Check out this Gameboy cartridge breakout PCB by Driptronics on Tindie:
Cartridge Breakout Board for Gameboy
A Gameboy cartridge breakout PCB that gives you access to a Gameboy cartridgeâs connections.
Works with all OG cartridge formats (GB, GBC & GBA).
Clean, simple, and cool.
Comes with 2 x 16 point male Dupont headers for you to solder yourself.
After making a huge splash in her Twitch debut last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) plans to join the streaming platform again tonight to play Among Us with MP Jagmeet Singh, leader of Canadaâs New Democratic Party, and two other Twitch streamers. The stream, hosted by Singh, is set to begin at 7PM ET on Friday.
Ocasio-Cortezâs first time playing Among Us on Twitch was a massive hit, peaking at 435,000 viewers at one point during the match on October 20th. She played with Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), as well as Twitch streamers Pokimane, HasanAbi, and more, to get out the vote, with the stream becoming one of the 20 most-viewed of all time.
Canadian Members of Parliament & US Members of Congress venting each other into space....
An international group of climate activists and Amazon warehouse workers have launched an online campaign called âMake Amazon Pay,â calling on the tech giant to provide better working conditions for its employees and to reduce its expanding carbon footprint. The protests come just as the New York Times reports that the Seattle-based company has been on a hiring spree this year, expanding its global workforce.
âDuring the Covid-19 pandemic, Amazon became a trillion dollar corporation, with CEO Jeff Bezos becoming the first person in history to amass $200 billion in personal wealth,â the campaign states on its website. âMeanwhile, Amazon warehouse workers risked their lives as essential workers, and faced threats and intimidation if they...
The Sunâs gravitational lens became something of an obsession of mine when I first learned about it in the 1990s. Although the physics of gravitational lensing became apparent in Einsteinâs work, and was indeed studied by him, it would take several decades before Sydney Liebes at Stanford worked out the mathematics and showed how a galaxy between us and a more distant quasar could focus the light of the quasar in ways astronomers could observe.
The Stanford connection persisted in the work of Von Eshleman, who as far as I know was the first to delve into whether our own Sun could be used in much the same way. As astronomers explored the concept in the 1980s, Italian physicist Claudio Maccone went on to conceive of a mission that could exploit lensing. The Sun bends the light of an object directly behind it (in terms of the observer) in such ways that potential magnifications are huge. Could we put a spacecraft into range of the gravitational lens (beginning at 550 AU and extending outward), to achieve unprecedented magnification at various wavelengths of another stellar system?
Image: Claudio Maccone, in a photo I snapped at one of the Breakthrough Discuss meetings in Palo Alto.
There is much to be said about the idea, and I want to explore various aspects of it again in a few days, but this morning I simply want to direct your attention to Dr. Macconeâs upcoming online presentation, in a âwebinarâ organized by Ravi Kumar Kopparapu (NASA GSFC) and Jacob Haqq Misra (Blue Marble Space Institute of Science).
Iâve looked at the presentation and see that it will range over all aspects of gravitational lensing that Dr. Maccone has addressed in his papers and books, including not only the implications for astronomy but also the potential for using lensing to boost communications from distant interstellar probes. Anyone interested in deep space astronomy and communications will find this a cutting-edge topic, and as you might expect, one that inspires controversy. The lensing effect is real. The key issue: Can we exploit it with near-term technologies?
The FOCAL mission that Dr. Maccone explores in his book Deep Space Flight and Communications: Exploiting the Sun as a Gravitational Lens (Springer Praxis, 2009) and subsequent papers is a deep dive into the hardware required to find the answer.
The seminar will take place on December 2 at 1100 US Eastern Time (1600 UTC) and is open to the public. The link I currently have for it is: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/6411016198
You can imagine why an effort like Breakthrough Starshot would find gravitational lensing as interesting as it does. If we could coax huge gain out of this natural lens, we could examine a star system like Alpha Centauri at close range long before sending a spacecraft there. And once deployed, even the tiny craft envisioned by Breakthrough Starshot would have the potential for returning data to Earth via a communications âbridgeâ enabled by lensing. Other astronomical uses of gravitational lensing are, as you might imagine, numerous (I for one would like to know what a FOCAL mission might achieve in studying the Cosmic Microwave Background).
More on all this next week as I return from a small holiday.
A foggy sunrise in Germany, a fiery protest in Guatemala, a resort in the Andaman Sea, a strongman contest in Crimea, the ongoing pandemic worldwide, mourning in Argentina for Diego Maradona, figure skating in Russia, Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City, and much more.
My understanding is that Modern design was meant to use common materials and mass production techniques to make high quality, attractive items that were affordable. Itâs tempting to claim that was a bit too ambitious, so they dropped the âaffordableâ part.
But thatâs not entirely fair. IKEA does a pretty good job of living up to the idea, even if the stores are built on the concept that youâre more likely to buy furniture if youâre trapped in a baffling maze.
As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).
Hackaday editor Mike Szczys writes about a recent Hackaday Remoticon talk:
Alfred Jones Talks About the Challenges of Designing Fully Self-Driving Vehicles
The leap to self-driving cars could be as game-changing as the one from horse power to engine power. If cars prove able to drive themselves better than humans do, the safety gains could be enormous: auto accidents were the #8 cause of death worldwide in 2016. And who doesnât want to turn travel time into something either truly restful or alternatively productive?
But getting there is a big challenge, as Alfred Jones knows all too well. The Head of Mechanical Engineering at Lyftâs level-5 self-driving division, his team is building the roof racks and other gear that gives the vehicles their sensors and computational hardware. In his keynote talk at Hackaday Remoticon, Alfred Jones walks us through what each level of self-driving means, how the problem is being approached, and where the sticking points are found between whatâs being tested now and a truly steering-wheel-free future.
Check out the video below, and take a deeper dive into the details of his talk.
This weekâs BSD Now is a special treat: an interview with author Michael W. Lucas, author of a bunch of BSD and non-BSD books.àIf youâre looking for presents, heâs selling extra books originally intended for convention salesâ¦
In a few hours our family will gather at the barn for what will certainly be the most unusual Thanksgiving celebration of our lifetime. Itâs only a minor inconvenience and if it keeps us all safe to enjoy another holiday together then it will have been well worth the inconvenience.
Hopefully next year we will resume the celebration in a more normal fashion. One thing is for certain, the youngest members of our family will revel in the telling of this Thanksgiving story to their children and their childrenâs children.
Wishing you a happy and safe holiday. Stay well.
If you have a Realtek network card supported by the re(4) driver, Sepherosa Ziehau has a new driver for you to test.
We are excited to see the wonderful Thomas Flummer in Copenhagen has designed a neat PCB pin for the virtual Chaos Communication Congress next month:
Fairy Dust mini PCB pin for RC3
This is a small PCB pin badge, heavily inspired by the RC3 styleguide. Itâs designed to be small, easy to assemble and hopefully many will manage to get some before the event, and be able to share a little bit of physical #badgelife, in this time of virtual events.
Making your own
If you want to make your own, I have included the gerbers, in case you donât want to install the nightly version of KiCad.
There is also a shared projects at OSHPark, and this is designed for the standard purple PCBs. Itâs designed to be exactly 2 square inches, so for USD 10 you get 3 pcs. shipped anywhere, though the standard shipping might take a bit to arrive.
The parts needed for this pin is simply 4 white 0603 LEDs, a series resistor, also 0603, to limit the current a bit (Iâll try with a 1K to begin with), a CR1220 coin cell holder (Iâm planning on using a Q&J CR1220-2 from LCSC) and then a little round brooch clasp/tie tack pin (I got some on ebay, but a DIY/craft supply store might also have them).
Please share
If you decide to make this badge or a variant of it, please share images so we can all see it and get inspired. If sharing on social media, please use the #badgelife tag and please let me know, I would love to see what you have made!
Here is the shared project:
The worldâs largest superconducting camera by pixel count has been deployed at the Subaru Telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This is a technology weâll want to watch, for it assists the effort to image exoplanets directly from the surface of the Earth, a goal that not so long ago would have seemed impossible. But it can be done, and we have a new generation of extremely large telescopes (ELTs) on the way, so the progress in support technology for such installations is heartening.
The new device is called the MKID Exoplanet Camera (MEC), with the four-letter acronym standing for Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector. A superconducting photon detector was first developed as far back as 2003 at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, paving the way for devices that can operate at wavelengths ranging from the far-infrared to X-rays. The MEC comes out of the laboratory of Ben Mazin at the University of California at Santa Barbara as part of an effort that includes contributions from both US and Japanese scientists.
The MKID Exoplanet Camera operates in the optical and near infrared, running at 90 millikelvin, or 1/1000th of a Kelvin, which is close to absolute zero. The technology involved can read out data thousands of times per second, according to the MECâs developers, which plays directly into the success of adaptive optics systems that are designed to correct for atmospheric distortions. Current adaptive optics methods bend a telescopeâs mirror at a rate of thousands of times per second, using complex algorithms to produce an image as it if were taken in space.
The problem: Planets most likely to be found with todayâs adaptive optics are young worlds still glowing with the heat of their formation. Mazin points to HR 8799, a system with four gas giants, each of which is more massive than Jupiter, as the kind of catch currently available, and indeed, HR 8799 has been confirmed by direct imaging with the Keck and Gemini telescopes in Hawaii. The planets are still hot and glowing as the system matures. Moving into the range of smaller, cooler worlds will take exquisite collaboration between adaptive optics and the camera.
The MKID technology allows Mazinâs MEC to determine the energy of each photon as it hits the detector. Sarah Steiger is a UC-Santa Barbara doctoral student who worked on the project:
âThis allows us not only to determine a planetâs brightness, but also to get a spectrum (the brightness as a function of energy), which can reveal additional information about an exoplanetâs properties, such as its age, mass and potentially atmospheric composition.â
Image: The 20440 pixel MKID device designed for MKID Exoplanet Camera is the highest pixel-count superconducting detector array at any wavelength. Credit: UC-Santa Barbara.
The fast data rates available with an MKID mean that the technology can work interactively with an observatoryâs adaptive optics system to remove scattered and diffracted starlight, which allows the detection of exoplanets much fainter than can currently be imaged. In terms of astrobiology, says Olivier Guyon, that means we can one day turn the MEC to nearby exoplanets that can be characterized in greater detail than before. Guyon is the project scientist in charge of the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) instrument:
âWeâre not going to be able to do that with Subaru, or with any of the current telescopes, because theyâre just a bit too small. But weâre preparing for the next big step, which is to deploy exoplanet imaging cameras on larger telescopes such as the Thirty Meter Telescope. When those telescopes come online, the same technologies, the same camera, the same tricks will allow us to actually look for life.â
Ahead for Mazinâs team is the refinement of the software and algorithms that make MEC effective, with fast optical correction being the focus for the next several years. For more on the camera and its ongoing development, see Walter et al., âThe MKID Exoplanet Camera for Subaru SCExAO,â Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Vol. 132, No. 1018 (17 November 2020). Abstract.
As the season progresses toward chillier days and nights, I thought it would be nice to take one last look at the colorful beauty of this autumn, seen in cities and countryside vistas across the Northern Hemisphere. Get cozy in a warm sweater and enjoy this batch of recent fall photos. For even more autumnal goodness, check out âFall Is in the Air: Images of the Seasonâ from earlier this year.
Last Thursday, Rudy Giuliani, a Trump campaign lawyer, alleged a widespread voting conspiracy involving Venezuela, Cuba, and China. Another lawyer, Sidney Powell, argued that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, the entire election in swing states should be overturned and the legislatures should make sure that the electors are selected for the president.
The Republican National Committee swung in to support her false claim that Mr. Trump won in a landslide, while Michigan election officials have tried to stop the certification of the vote.
It is wildly unlikely that their efforts can block Joe Biden from becoming president. But they may still do lasting damage to American democracy for a shocking reason: the moves have come from trusted insiders.
American democracyâs vulnerability to disinformation has been very much in the news since the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016. The fear is that outsiders, whether they be foreign or domestic actors, will undermine our system by swaying popular opinion and election results.
This is half right. American democracy is an information system, in which the information isnât bits and bytes but citizensâ beliefs. When peoplesâ faith in the democratic system is undermined, democracy stops working. But as information security specialists know, outsider attacks are hard. Russian trolls, who donât really understand how American politics works, have actually had a difficult time subverting it.
When you really need to worry is when insiders go bad. And that is precisely what is happening in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. In traditional information systems, the insiders are the people who have both detailed knowledge and high level access, allowing them to bypass security measures and more effectively subvert systems. In democracy, the insiders arenât just the officials who manage voting but also the politicians who shape what people believe about politics. For four years, Donald Trump has been trying to dismantle our shared beliefs about democracy. And now, his fellow Republicans are helping him.
Democracy works when we all expect that votes will be fairly counted, and defeated candidates leave office. As the democratic theorist Adam Przeworski puts it, democracy is âa system in which parties lose elections.â These beliefs can break down when political insiders make bogus claims about general fraud, trying to cling to power when the election has gone against them.
Itâs obvious how these kinds of claims damage Republican votersâ commitment to democracy. They will think that elections are rigged by the other side and will not accept the judgment of voters when it goes against their preferred candidate. Their belief that the Biden administration is illegitimate will justify all sorts of measures to prevent it from functioning.
Itâs less obvious that these strategies affect Democratic votersâ faith in democracy, too. Democrats are paying attention to Republicansâ efforts to stop the votes of Democratic voters Â- and especially Black Democratic voters -Â from being counted. They, too, are likely to have less trust in elections going forward, and with good reason. They will expect that Republicans will try to rig the system against them. Mr. Trump is having a hard time winning unfairly, because he has lost in several states. But what if Mr. Bidenâs margin of victory depended only on one state? What if something like that happens in the next election?
The real fear is that this will lead to a spiral of distrust and destruction. Republicans  who are increasingly committed to the notion that the Democrats are committing pervasive fraud - will do everything that they can to win power and to cling to power when they can get it. Democrats Â- seeing what Republicans are doing  will try to entrench themselves in turn. They suspect that if the Republicans really win power, they will not ever give it back. The claims of Republicans like Senator Mike Lee of Utah that America is not really a democracy might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
More likely, this spiral will not directly lead to the death of American democracy. The U.S. federal system of government is complex and hard for any one actor or coalition to dominate completely. But it may turn American democracy into an unworkable confrontation between two hostile camps, each unwilling to make any concession to its adversary.
We know how to make voting itself more open and more secure; the literature is filled with vital and important suggestions. The more difficult problem is this. How do you shift the collective belief among Republicans that elections are rigged?
Political science suggests that partisans are more likely to be persuaded by fellow partisans, like Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, who said that election fraud wasnât a big problem. But this would only be effective if other well-known Republicans supported him.
Public outrage, alternatively, can sometimes force officials to back down, as when people crowded in to denounce the Michigan Republican election officials who were trying to deny certification of their votes.
The fundamental problem, however, is Republican insiders who have convinced themselves that to keep and hold power, they need to trash the shared beliefs that hold American democracy together.
They may have long-term worries about the consequences, but theyâre unlikely to do anything about those worries in the near-term unless voters, wealthy donors or others whom they depend on make them pay short-term costs.
This essay was written with Henry Farrell, and previously appeared in the New York Times.
Different as the cells from animals, plants, fungi and protozoa can be, they all share one prominent feature: a nucleus. They have other organelles, too, like the energy-producing mitochondria, but the presence of a nucleus â a well-defined porous pouch full of genetic material â is what inspired the biologist Ãdouard Chatton in 1925 to coin the term eukaryotes, which referred to living things with a âtrue kernel.â All the rest he labeled prokaryotes, for life âbefore kernel.â This dichotomy between nucleated and nonnucleated life became fundamental to biology.
No one knows exactly how the nucleus evolved and created that division. Growing evidence has persuaded some researchers, however, that the nucleus might have arisen through a symbiotic partnership much like the one believed to have produced mitochondria. A crucial difference, though, is that the partner responsible for the nucleus might not have been a cell at all, but a virus.
âWhat we are is a classic case of what they call emergent complexity,â explained Philip Bell, the head of research for the yeast biotechnology company MicroBioGen. Bell proposed a viral origin for the eukaryotic nucleus back in 2001 and refreshed the theory in September. âItâs three organisms that came together to make a new community, which eventually integrated to such an extent that it became, effectively, a new life-form.â
He and other researchers take their confidence from findings such as the demonstration that giant viruses build âviral factoriesâ inside prokaryotic cells â compartments that, much like the nucleus, uncouple the processes of transcription (reading genes) and translation (constructing proteins). âI think itâs now the strongest model,â he said.
Most researchers who study the origins of eukaryotes might not agree with him; some still describe it as an idea on the fringe. But proponents of a viral origin point out that several recent discoveries line up conveniently with a viral model â and they believe that conclusive evidence in their favor is finally within reach.
Scientists generally think eukaryotes first came on the scene between 2.5 billion and 1.5 billion years ago, when evidence suggests that a bacterium took up residence inside a different kind of prokaryote, an archaeon, and became its mitochondrion. But a deeper mystery surrounds the emergence of the nucleus; no one even knows whether that ancient archaeon was already a kind of proto-eukaryote with a nucleus, or whether the nucleus came later.
Any origin story for the eukaryotic nucleus needs to explain several of its features. Thereâs the nature of the structure, for starters: its nested inner and outer membranes, and the pores that connect its interior to the rest of the cell. Thereâs also the curious way it compartmentalizes the expression of genes within itself but leaves the construction of proteins outside. And a truly persuasive origin story must also explain why the nucleus exists at all â what evolutionary pressures pushed those ancient cells to wall up their genomes.
For most of the past century and more, conjectures about the origin of the nucleus failed to answer at least one of those questions. But around the turn of the 21st century, two researchers independently came up with the idea that viruses were responsible for the nucleus.
In Japan, Masaharu Takemura (then a research associate at Nagoya University) was studying the biochemistry of DNA polymerases â enzymes that cells use to copy DNA â when he became interested in their evolution. âI performed a phylogenetic analysis of DNA polymerases including eukaryotic, bacterial, archaeal and viral ones,â Takemura, now a molecular biologist and virologist at Tokyo University of Science, recalled in an email. His analysis revealed that one group of viruses (the poxviruses) had DNA polymerases that were surprisingly similar to one of the major classes of polymerases from eukaryotes. He hypothesized that the eukaryotic enzyme originated as a contribution from some ancient poxvirus.
Takemura also knew that poxviruses create and replicate inside compartments within the cells they infect. This combination of facts led him to theorize that the eukaryotic cell nucleus was derived from one of these ancestral poxvirus compartments â a proposal he published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution in May 2001.
Meanwhile, in Australia, Bell had come to a similar conclusion for different reasons. As a graduate student in the early 1990s, he had taken an interest in theories about the origin of the nucleus, especially the idea that, like mitochondria, it might have started as an endosymbiont. âFive minutes of looking and I go, âJeez, if itâs an endosymbiont, itâs not a bacterial one,ââ he recalled. There were just too many differences between bacterial and eukaryotic genomes, he felt, like the fact that eukaryotes have linear chromosomes while bacteria tend to have circular ones.
But when he looked at viral genomes, he came across striking similarities between the genome structure of poxviruses and eukaryotes. âIt took me nine years to publish the first version of the model,â he noted. Then it took 18 months of back-and-forth to get the paper published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution ⦠four issues after Takemuraâs paper.
Now, nearly 20 years later, both Takemura and Bell have independently updated their hypotheses. Takemuraâs revision was published online in Frontiers in Microbiology on September 3, Bellâs in Virus Research on September 20. âHeâs done it to me again,â Bell said, laughing.
Both scientists cited recent discoveries involving an extraordinary group of âgiant virusesâ as one of the main reasons for the updates. These viruses were totally unknown when Takemura and Bell published their initial hypotheses. Their genomes, which have more than 1 million base pairs, rival those of small, free-living bacteria in size, and they carry viral versions of genes for proteins involved in essential processes in cells. (Thereâs some evidence that the eukaryotic versions of several of these proteins came from these viruses.)
But most importantly, these giant viruses replicate inside complex, self-constructed compartments in a host cellâs cytoplasm, which is why these viruses, like poxviruses, are classified as nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses (NCLDVs). For these giant viruses, the compartments they make are âviral factories which are as big as a eukaryotic nucleus,â said Patrick Forterre, an evolutionary biologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Tellingly, the viral factories made by NCLDVs that infect eukaryotes also have inner and outer membranes like the nucleus. Giant viruses are what Forterre, Takemura and Bell say are responsible for the origin of the nucleus.
There are two possible ways the nucleus could have come from giant viruses, according to Forterre. âEither the viral factories became the nucleus, or proto-eukaryotic cells ⦠learned from the virus in order to make themselves a kind of viral factory to protect the chromosomes,â he said.
Takemura thinks the latter is more likely: that a virus was more of an unintentional contributor to eukaryotic cells, as both the stimulus for an archaeonâs construction of a genetic barrier and the source of some of the genes needed to construct it.
According to his hypothesis, long ago, a giant virus constructed a viral factory, enclosing its own genome but also that of its archaeon host. But unlike most infected cells, this host managed to steal the virusâs barrier-building trick and constructed its own compartment â one that defended its genome against the virus. Over time, this semipermanent barrier evolved into the nucleus as we know it.
Bell prefers the version in which a viral factory directly became the nucleus, as the process more closely mirrors the known behavior of viruses that infect prokaryotes today. âTheyâre more like Invasion of the Body Snatchers,â he said.
He believes an ancient giant virus infected an archaeon and set up a viral factory but didnât kill its host cell. Instead, the structure managed to stick around. âAnd then the virus, which is a gene thief, stole the genes from the archaea and completely destroyed its genome,â he explained. Thatâs a common theme with viruses, especially giant ones â they take genes from their hosts, which makes them less dependent on their hosts. That might even help explain why so many mitochondrial genes have moved to the nucleus: âOver the years it has been stealing the genes from the mitochondria and starting to control it as well.â
So in a way, âthe virus just wears the archaeonâs cell as a cloak,â Bell said. And if that model is right, he pointed out, âyou could say at the heart of every human cell is a virus.â
Since those early publications from Takemura and Bell, several discoveries have lined up well with the idea of a viral origin for the nucleus. Whole branches of the giant virus family tree have been discovered, for instance, broadening our understanding of their evolution and, in particular, the essential genes theyâve swapped with their hosts â ones they have stolen or, in some cases, perhaps given to cells.
In addition, in 2017 researchers discovered a virus that constructed a viral factory inside a bacterial host. Up until then, viral factories appeared to be exclusive to the viruses that infect eukaryotes, so finding one in a prokaryote bolstered the idea that something similar could have happened long ago to initiate the formation of a nucleus.
In the case of that virus, âthis nucleus-like structure is not membrane-based,â Takemura said, which makes it distinct from many viral factories and eukaryotic nuclei. Still, he feels that this instance of a virus constructing a protective âcompartmentâ around its genome inside prokaryotic cells âstrongly suggests that in ancestral eukaryotic cell ⦠the same kind of compartmentalization by virus occurred.â
Just this year, researchers spotted pores in the double-membrane-bound viral factories of coronaviruses, which are eerily reminiscent of the pores found in cell nuclei. âIf this result holds up, and assuming that the pore-forming protein was not derived from a eukaryotic genome, then it does blunt one argument against the virus model,â wrote David A. Baum, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in an email.
Still, Baum doesnât buy the idea that viruses had anything to do with the origin of the nucleus. To him, the idea only complicates matters. âWhat problem in eukaryogenesis requires viruses as its solution?â he wrote.
Baum, along with his cousin, Buzz Baum, a cell biologist at University College London, has proposed a different hypothesis: that the nucleus is actually a remnant of the ancestral archaeonâs outer membrane. Essentially, they think an ancestral archaeon began reaching into the world around it and associating with bacteria through these exploratory blebs of membrane. Over time, the blebs grew and grew, until they fused together again â generating a new outer membrane and inner membrane folds that gave rise to other intracellular compartments. âThe closest living known relatives of eukaryotes have extensive extracellular protrusionsâ that interact with prokaryotes, David Baum noted, âvery surprisingly similar to the model we proposed.â
As for the evidence that viruses gave eukaryotes some of their most essential nuclear proteins, his chief concern is that itâs very hard to be sure about directionality. âViruses are the ultimate kleptomaniacs,â he said, so theyâre constantly taking genes from their hosts. âI think weâve got to be very careful to ask whether we find similarities between viruses and eukaryotes. We donât know whether they gave it to the eukaryotes, or the eukaryotes gave it to them.â
Purificación López-GarcÃa, a microbial ecologist at Paris-Saclay University and a research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research, is similarly unconvinced that eukaryotes rely on what were originally viral proteins. âThere is no evidence at all that there is any homologous relationship between viruses and cell and eukaryotic nuclei,â she said.
Yet López-GarcÃa doesnât agree with the Baumsâ blebbing model, either. She and her colleagues donât think that eukaryotes started with an archaeon engulfing bacteria that would become mitochondria. Instead, in their view, the archaeon was already living inside a bigger bacterium, the result of an earlier endosymbiotic event. âSo in our model, the nucleus would derive from this archaeon, and the cytoplasm would derive from a bacterium,â and this duo took in the mitochondria-to-be, she explained.
But Takemura says these other hypotheses are flawed, because at best they âonly explain the phenomenon that the nucleus emergedâ â they lack the evolutionary rationale for why the genome was boxed up, and why the protein-making parts were excluded. Thatâs a sticking point for Bell, too: He doesnât see how any of the other hypotheses explain the separation of transcription and translation.
The viral origin just makes the most sense and has the strongest evidence, Forterre said. âI donât think they are really serious,â he said of the opposing theories. âI would say that viruses play a major role in this story.â
It will take a lot more evidence to convince scientists like the Baums and López-GarcÃa to come around to Forterreâs point of view. But two decadesâ worth of advances in technology may finally be bringing that evidence within reach.
Just this year, researchers from Japan announced that after more than a decade of trying, they had finally isolated and cultured Lokiarchaeota â archaea of the type believed to have been part of the original eukaryotic partnership. That could open the door to discovering viruses that infect these distant relatives of ours and visualizing exactly what those infections actually look like.
âIf you were to find a new class of viruses infecting the Lokiarchaeota, that got inside the cells and set up camp there and opened pores to facilitate rapid flow of transcripts into the cytoplasm â that would be compellingâ evidence that viruses gave rise to the nucleus, David Baum said.
Bell noted that a trove of giant viruses was recently sequenced from the very same deep-sea sediments where Lokiarchaeota were discovered. He hopes someone will test whether any of these viruses can infect archaea and, if so, whether they build viral factories similar to those made by the NCLDVs that infect eukaryotes. Demonstrating that, he said, would be âgame over.â
Takemura, too, is hopeful such a virus exists. âThe discovery of archaeal viruses which construct nucleus-like and membrane-based structures in archaeal cells will be the strongest evidence of the viral origin for the nucleus,â he said.
Until that kind of extraordinary evidence is in hand, viral eukaryogenesis will likely remain controversial. But even if it doesnât end up winning the battle for acceptance, every test of the theory reveals bits and pieces of our evolutionary past â and because of that, weâre getting closer and closer to learning the truth about where we came from.
On Tuesday night, SpaceX successfully launched another batch of the companyâs internet-from-space Starlink satellites to orbit, using a very space-hardened Falcon 9 rocket for the job. This launch marked the rocketâs seventh flight to space and back â the first time SpaceX has flown such a seasoned vehicle to orbit.
The Falcon 9 took off at 9:13PM ET from SpaceXâs launch site at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, with 60 Starlink satellites in tow. After a quick trip to space, the first stage of the Falcon 9 â the bulk of the vehicle that contains the main engines and most of the fuel â separated from the rest of the rocket and came back to Earth. It then performed one of SpaceXâs signature rocket landings, touching down on...
The trouble with time travel is that when you get where youâre going, no one will believe you when you tell them about your journey. Think about it, if you traveled back in time to a month before the JFK assassination and tried to convince anyone that the event would soon happen, you would most likely be ignored and ridiculed. And on the odd chance someone paid attention to your incredible story, you might be locked away as a security risk. Then once the event transpired as you described it, you would at the very least be considered a co-conspirator, how else could your foreknowledge be explained?
This isnât particularly profound, it just makes sense if you think two minutes about it. Itâs also the premise of nearly every fictional work about time travel. My wife and I have been watching the old Dark Shadows gothic TV soap opera from the 1960âs. Weâre more than 400 episodes into the spooky events at Collinwood (not yet half-way through the series). Anyway, one of the main characters, Victoria Winters, has been magically transported from 1967 to 1795. Her knowledge of key events in the history of the Collins family have convinced the 18th century locals that she is a witch, and that could be a life-ending event in those days.
Trust me, when you travel back in time you should blend in as best you can - and keep your mouth shut at all times, which takes most of the fun out of time travel if you ask me.
One easy way to do that is to travel back in time via the archives of QST magazine that the ARRL makes available to members. That archive goes all the way back to 1915. You can follow the story of amateur radio through a couple of World Wars, a Great Depression, two global pandemics, World Fairâs, and the pioneer work that eventually evolved into the Deep Space Network and the smart phone in your pocket.
Itâs a much safer way to travel back in time. You wonât get âstuckâ there and you wonât need weapons. Plus, visits via old QST magazines wonât permit you to accidentally kill your grandfather, a rookie time-traveler mistakeâ¦
Because of this commit that makes some changes to lib/stdio, you might get more reinstalls than you expect on your next pkg upgrade because of the __DragonFly_version change. This only applies to -current (5.9) users.
(I might be wrong)
When this comic first ran there was an argument in the comments about the concept of âinvasive brain surgery.â More than one reader maintained that any brain surgery must be, by definition, invasive.
One of the problems with being kind of a pedant who makes a comic about a guy whoâs kind of a pedant is that the comments section will tend to draw pedants.
If youâve ever wondered why I no longer have comments, now you know.
As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).
From Glen Akins (@bikerglen):
Converting More Vintage Grass Valley Hardware to USB
In this project, I convert two panels from a vintage Grass Valley video switcher into general-purpose USB input and output devices without modifying the original panels. This project required both reverse engineering the hardware and deciphering the software protocols used to communicate with the panels. Because these panels required learning how to communicate with a microcontroller and a small FPGA, this project was significantly more challenging than the previous project where I converted a matrix button panel from the same mixer into a USB device.
In this write up, weâll examine the two panels in detail and determine the hardware interface to the panels. Once the hardware interface is determined, weâll build some boards to use to help decipher the protocols used to control the boards. Once the protocols are understood, weâll build a second set of boards to control the panels using USB then develop the USB software and an example Linux application that controls the panels over USB. This project took about four months from start to completion.
I have USB control of everything on both of these Grass Valley Kalypso panels now!
â Glen Akins (@bikerglen) November 15, 2020Get key presses
Time to take some photos and write them up! pic.twitter.com/WPeu0EMtpt
In a lecture, Adam Shostack makes the case for a discipline of cyber public health. It would relate to cybersecurity in a similar way that public health relates to medicine.
The evolving system known as [BHB2007] 1 is a part of the Pipe Nebula (also called Barnard 59), about 600 light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus. It is part of a binary star system in formation that has been studied with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). Both protostars show disks in formation around them, surrounded by filaments of gas and dust drawn from the larger disk that are being referred to as âfeeding filaments.â Paola Caselli (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Germany), who made that reference in 2019, is co-author of new work on the stellar object, which gives us an unusual look at early system formation.
Image: This false-color image shows the filaments of accretion around the protostar [BHB2007] 1. The large structures are inflows of molecular gas (CO) nurturing the disk surrounding the protostar. The inset shows the dust emission from the disk, which is seen edge-on. The âholesâ in the dust map represent an enormous ringed cavity seen sideways in the disk structure. Credit © MPE.
This is apparently a case of star and planet growing in tandem. The young stellar object [BHB2007] 1 is thought to be no older than 1 million years, with most of the surrounding envelope having dissipated and clear emission visible from the circumstellar disk. The authors note the clean, wide gap in the dust, adding that it is surprising for such a young system, for accretion from the molecular cloud seems to be continuing, as the filament activity makes clear.
Most circumstellar disks in this age range are fully formed as planet formation begins. Felipe Alves (MPE) is lead author on the paper, which has just appeared in Astrophysical Journal Letters:
âWe were quite surprised to observe such prominent accretion filaments falling into the disk. The accretion filament activity demonstrates that the disk is still growing while simultaneously nurturing the protostar.â
Supplementing the ALMA data with observations at radio frequencies from the Very Large Array, the researchers make the case for a young giant planet or perhaps a brown dwarf present within a 70 AU cavity inside the disk, a zone filled with hot molecular gas. Planetary accretion of an object between 4 and 70 Jupiter masses would produce the disk gap.
Image: Two different observations of the protoplanetary disk show signatures of the formation of a companion to the protostar . The grey scale represents the dust thermal emission from the disk, same as in the inset of Fig. 1. The red/blue contours show the molecular CO brightness emission levels from the northern/southern side of the dust cavity observed with ALMA. The brighter CO emission from the south indicates that the gas is hotter there. This location coincides with a zone of non-thermal emission tracing ionised gas (green contours) observed with the VLA (middle), which is observed in addition to the protostar (centre of the image). The team proposes that both the ionised gas and the hot molecular gas are due to the presence of a protoplanet or a brown dwarf in the cavity. The configuration of such a system is shown in the sketch on the right. Credit: © MPE; illustration: Gabriel A. P. Franco.
MPEâs Caselli explains the significance of the finding:
âWe present a new case of star and planet formation happening in tandem. Our observations strongly indicate that protoplanetary disks keep accreting material also after planet formation has started. This is important because the fresh material falling onto the disk will affect both the chemical composition of the future planetary system and the dynamical evolution of the whole disk.â
Studying star and planet formation together gives us interesting constraints for how young systems evolve out of the original cloud surrounding them. [BHB2007] 1 gives us the kind of gap in a circumstellar disk weâve observed in other young systems, but in this case itâs a disk still being actively fed by filaments from the surrounding molecular cloud. In at least one case, then, we see the possible formation of planets before the disk itself has fully formed. The existence of an object in formation is supported by VLAâs data on radio emission within the dust gap between the inner and outer disk, giving heft to the assertion that simultaneous formation is occurring.
The paper is Alves et al., âA case of simultaneous star and planet formation,â Astrophysical Journal Letters Vol. 904, No. 1 (19 November 2020). Abstract / Preprint.
Is physics finished? The 21st century is often called the age of biology. Or artificial intelligence. Or any other emerging field. This relegates physics to the previous century â the golden days when the revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics shook the world, and the discoveries of elementary particles led to a string of Nobel Prizes. Nowadays, people worry about a âdesert scenario,â where no new particles will be found for many decades to come, if ever.
I believe this point of view is wrong, in at least three distinct ways. First of all, for a subject supposedly past its prime, the first two decades of this century have been pretty successful for physics. We saw the discovery of the Higgs particle in 2012, the detection of gravitational waves in 2015 (announced in 2016) and the first image of a black holeâs event horizon in 2019. All three were rare instances of scientific mega-events that landed on the front pages of newspapers and captured the imagination of the world.
But, one could argue, the seeds that led to these discoveries were all planted in the good old days. Black holes and gravitational waves are direct consequences of the equations Albert Einstein discovered in 1915. Maybe physics has run out of original ideas?
That brings us to the second argument. Recent advances in cosmology allow us to state, with a fair amount of certainty, that 95 percent of the universe is missing. These missing parts consist of dark matter and dark energy, both equally mysterious forms of new physics. As long as such mysteries remain â and there are others â the work of physics will not be complete. (I might also add that understanding 5 percent of a subject is in itself a wonderful achievement.)
The third reason the reports of the death of physics are greatly exaggerated comes from a more fundamental and categorical mistake: Defining progress in terms of discovering new particles or forces is a myopic view of physics. It ignores a large part of the discipline, and vastly underestimates what we can still achieve. In fact, I believe that what we currently know is an absolutely negligible fraction of the physics thatâs out there, waiting to be investigated.
The aim of physics is to understand in a precise, mathematical way all manifestation of matter and energy in the universe â and we have barely started to explore this infinitude of possibilities. Claiming that physics is finished is akin to arguing that mathematics ended after the introduction of natural numbers and basic arithmetic, or that chemistry was over with the advent of the periodic table. Learning the rules of chess doesnât make you a grandmaster.
The truth is, the realm of the smallest particles is not the only place you can find the fundamental laws of physics. They can also âemergeâ out of the collective behavior of many constituents. A simple example is sound waves, the synchronized oscillations of molecules of matter. By using the rules of quantum theory, these waves themselves can be described in terms of particles. These âphononsâ are elementary packets, or âquanta,â of sound, and their behavior is similar to that of photons, the quanta of light. So, like the fictional Baron Munchausen who lifted himself out of a swamp by pulling on his own hair, physics is self-sustaining â it can use itself to produce new fundamental insights, which can then be captured in rigorous mathematics.
Confronted with the endless number of physical systems we could fabricate out of the currently known fundamental pieces of the universe, I begin to imagine an upside-down view of physics. Instead of studying a natural phenomenon, and subsequently discovering a law of nature, one could first design a new law and then reverse engineer a system that actually displays the phenomena described by the law. For example, physics has moved far beyond the simple phases of matter of high school courses â solid, liquid, gas. Many potential âexoticâ phases, made possible by the bizarre consequences of quantum mechanics, have been cataloged in theoretical explorations, and we can now start realizing these possibilities in the lab with specially designed materials.
All of this is part of a much larger shift in the very scope of science, from studying what is to what could be. In the 20th century, scientists sought out the building blocks of reality: the molecules, atoms and elementary particles out of which all matter is made; the cells, proteins and genes that make life possible; the bits, algorithms and networks that form the foundation of information and intelligence, both human and artificial. This century, instead, we will begin to explore all there is to be made with these building blocks.
For even with 14 billion years of an expanding universe and almost 4 billion years of life on Earth, nature has explored only the tiniest fraction of all of the possible designs. As the biologist Richard Dawkins likes to point out, we human beings â along with every other organism that has ever lived â are all the lucky winners of a cosmic lottery. From a mind-boggling number of possible genetic blueprints, our codes were chosen by chance to be realized as a living prototype. The same goes for all forms of matter around us. The natural processes on Earth and in the universe have produced only a small sample of the full menu of molecules and forms of matter, and consequently of the corresponding laws of physics they will have to obey.
But all of this is now changing. Natureâs agonizingly slow process of discovery, driven by cosmological and biological evolution on time scales of millions and billions of years, is accelerated to breakneck speeds in the laboratory. Such work might feel, at first, like âartificialâ science. But a genetically designed bacterium is in no way less real, or less worthy of study, than one found in the wild. Nor are the novel one- and two-dimensional materials that display the curiosities of quantum theory. Rather, such new technologies effectively âliberateâ quantum mechanics from the confines of atoms and molecules and bring it to the macroscopic scales of everyday life. At some point, we will be able to order every item on the menu of reality.
Science concerns all phenomena, including the ones created in our laboratories and in our heads. Once we are fully aware of this grander scope, a different image of the research enterprise emerges. Now, finally, the ship of science is leaving the safe inland waterways carved by nature, and is heading for the open ocean, exploring a brave new world with âartificialâ materials, organisms, brains and perhaps even a better version of ourselves.
So my optimistic outlook for physics is equally true for all other branches of science: The adventure has only just begun.
I did a 4 hour exposure (32-inch telescope) of the horsehead using 6 filters. Ten days I ago spent 4 hours obtaining a new horsehead nebula. This is using 6 filters, red, green, blue, but also Ha, S2 and O3. Using narrowband is tricky for color balance but using the RGB helped that out, and got the intrinsic resolution enhancement of the narrow band filters. Been busy, so finally processed this weekend. My previous image was eight years ago only RGB. There is significantly more detail in this image than my prior. I had to play with the six different filter stack sets to get just the right balance of detail and color.
If anyone wants to see my collection of over 600 images, broken into messier, NGC, IC, etc, go to: www.mariomottamd.com
Thank you, Mario Motta
It was 38F and raining when I awoke this morning. Sooner or later the temps are going to go a little lower and Iâll be reporting snow instead of cold rain. Thatâs not a concern since Iâve been working from home since March and with no end in sight and no more morning commute I say let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
Iâm home alone this morning. My wife is at work and the dog is at daycare. Todayâs coffee is Peetâs Dark Roast and itâs been going down easy while I await the window guy who is supposed to install three new windows this morning.
Back in the early days of summer I ordered a Skydio 2 drone. There was an expected delay, followed by a couple of unexpected delays and next thing you know, itâs nearly winter. But I received an email yesterday telling me that itâs finally my turn and the smart new drone should arrive here next week.
Today, China successfully launched its most ambitious mission to the Moon to date â this one designed to bring a handful of lunar rocks back to Earth before the end of the year. If successful, itâll be the first time in nearly half a century that dirt from the Moon has been returned to Earth and the first time that China has retrieved materials from another world.
The mission, called Changâe 5, is the latest in a long line of lunar missions that China has been conducting over the last decade. In 2013, the country made its first soft landing on the Moon with Changâe 3, making China just one of three nations to put a spacecraft on the lunar surface. Then in December 2018, China launched Changâe 4 and successfully put a lander and rover on...
From Elliot Williams on the Hackaday blog:
Mike and I were talking about an interesting smart-glasses hack on the podcast. This was one of those projects where, even if you donât need a pair of glasses with LEDs on them to help you navigate around, you just couldnât help but marvel at a lot of the little design choices made throughout.
For instance, I love the way the flex PCB is made to do double duty by wrapping around the battery and forming a battery holder. This struck me as one of those quintessential hacks that only occurs to you because you need it. Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that. There was a problem, how to fit a battery holder in the tiny space, and a set of resources that included a flex PCB substrate. Cleverly mashing that all together ended up with a novel solution. This wouldnât occur to you if you were just sitting at the beach; youâd have to be designing something electronic, space-constrained, and on a flex PCB to come up with this.
Mike made an offhand comment about how sometimes you just need to finish a project for the good ideas and clever solutions that youâll come up with along the way, and I think this battery holder example drives that point home. I canât count the number of my projects that may or may not have been dumb in retrospect, but along the way I came up with a little trick that Iâll end up using in many further projects, outliving the original application.
Finishing up a project on principle is a reasonable goal just on its own. But when the process of seeing something to conclusion is the generator of new and interesting challenges and solutions, itâs even more valuable. So if youâre stuck on a project, and not sure you want to take it all the way, consider if the journey itself could be the destination, and look at it as an opportunity to come up with that next long-lasting trick.
Ever since astronomers reached a consensus in the 1980s that most of the mass in the universe is invisible â that âdark matterâ must glue galaxies together and gravitationally sculpt the cosmos as a whole â experimentalists have hunted for the nonluminous particles.
They first set out in pursuit of a heavy, sluggish form of dark matter called a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP â the early favorite candidate for the cosmosâs missing matter because it could solve another, unrelated puzzle in particle physics. Over the decades, teams of physicists set up ever larger targets, in the form of huge crystals and multi-ton vats of exotic liquids, hoping to catch the rare jiggle of an atom when a WIMP banged into it.
But these detectors have stayed quiet, and physicists are increasingly contemplating a broader spectrum of possibilities. On the heavy end, they say the universeâs invisible matter could clump into black holes as heavy as stars. At the other extreme, dark matter could spread out in a fine mist of particles thousands of trillions of trillions of times lighter than electrons.
With new hypotheses come new detection methods. Kathryn Zurek, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, said that if current WIMP experiments donât see anything, âthen I think thereâs going to be a substantial part of the field thatâs going to shift into these new kinds of experiments.â
Already, the work has begun. Here are a few of the many new fronts in the search for dark matter.
WIMPs would have enough heft to occasionally bowl over a whole atom. But in case dark matter is lighter, some experimentalists are setting up smaller bowling pins.
A gentler rain of dark matter particles weighing less than protons could occasionally knock electrons free from their host atoms. The first experiment designed specifically to pick up this dark matter is the Sub-Electron-Noise Skipper CCD Experimental Instrument (Sensei), which uses technology similar to that of digital cameras to amplify signals from unexpectedly emancipated electrons inside materials.
When a Sensei prototype switched on with just one-tenth of a gram of silicon, it didnât find dark matter. Even so, the teamâs results, published in 2018, instantly ruled out certain models.
âWe just turned on and we had the worldâs best limits,â said Tien-Tien Yu, a physicist at the University of Oregon and a Sensei collaboration member, âbecause there were no limits before.â
Recent results from a 2-gram version of Sensei extend those limits, and now Yu and her colleagues are preparing to deploy a 10-gram version in an underground laboratory in Canada, away from interfering cosmic rays. Other groups are designing alternative low-cost experiments targeting the same low-hanging fruit.
If dark matter is lighter still, or blind to electric charge, it might fail to unleash an electron. Zurek has brainstormed ways that even these pipsqueaks could betray their presence by influencing the behavior of groups of particles.
Imagine a block of silicon, for example, as a mattress with springs representing atomic nuclei. Bounce a quarter off the mattress, Zurek says, and while no single spring will move much, the coin could set off a ripple that passes through many springs. She proposed in 2017 that an analogous disturbance from a dark matter interaction might generate sound waves that could slightly warm the system.
One project taking this route, Tesseract, is currently running in a basement at the University of California, Berkeley, looking for ripples from dark particles similar in heft to those that Sensei targets. Sensitive future upgrades, however, could theoretically find particles up to a thousand times lighter.
But there are even more lilliputian particle possibilities. The axion â an entity so slight itâs more wave than particle â could comprise dark matter and simultaneously solve a mystery about the strong nuclear force. The Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX) recently began scanning for axions decaying into pairs of photons inside a mighty magnetic field, and several similar searches are starting up.
Some experiments are aiming for even lighter stuff. The lightest that dark matter could possibly be is about one-thousandth of a trillionth of a trillionth of the electronâs mass â which would result in a particle thatâs like an extremely low-energy wave, with a wavelength the size of a small galaxy. Lighter (and therefore longer) entities would be too diffuse to explain why galaxies stick together.
While experimentalists prepare the next generation of apparatuses seeking direct contact with dark matter, others plan to scour the heavens for indirect signposts.Â
Enormous clouds of dark matter are thought to create galaxies and stars by gravitationally drawing in visible matter. But any smaller dark matter clusters that might exist wouldnât do this. These modest blobs would be completely dark, but they should still gravitationally bend passing starlight. One group of researchers is searching for this âlensingâ of starlight by dark matter blobs in data from the ongoing GAIA survey.
âDark structures are moving throughout our galaxy,â said Anna-Maria Taki, a physicist from the University of Oregon and a member of the team. âAs they move, they distort the positions and the proper motions and trajectories of luminous sources.â
Preliminary results published in September did not locate any such structures heavier than about 100 million suns. With larger future data sets, the researchers hope to discern the possible outlines of wispier dark clouds. From the shapes and sizes of these hypothetical structures, the scientists could infer whether, and in what manner, dark matter particles interact with themselves.
Other researchers have come up with a way to harness the quickly growing catalog of exoplanets. âWe have billions of these things just sitting out there,â said Rebecca Leane, a particle physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and co-author of a proposal from September.
The idea is that a planet may collect dark matter in its core as it sweeps through the Milky Way. As those dark matter particles annihilate with their antiparticles, they heat up the planet. Exoplanets closer to the galactic center pass through denser dark matter, so they should glow hotter with infrared light. If the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope can take the temperature of a few thousand exoplanets, Leane and a colleague calculated, that data set could bear the fingerprints of annihilating dark particles in the electron-to-proton mass range.
WIMPS may be down, but theyâre not out. A nearly 4-ton tank of xenon will start a two-year run in March at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. And a team in South Korea, the Cosine-100 collaboration, seeks to check a controversial claim from another Gran Sasso experiment called DAMA. In that experiment, an array of sodium iodide crystals has logged exactly the kind of seasonal variations one might expect if Earth is presenting different faces to the âwindâ of dark matter it passes through. âThey have an annual modulation, no ifs, ands or buts. But what is it?â said Katherine Freese, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin. âWe canât figure it out.â
Freese, whose calculations helped launch the era of WIMP experiments, has new ideas for tracking down the particles too. In 2018 she suggested that WIMPs might have burrowed into rocks buried miles underground, and she recently signed on to a proposal to go dig them up.
Many physicists expect dark matter to be as omnipresent as it is aloof. If they can come up with enough ways to sense the invisible â like checking whether it tickles different types of detectors, or whether it nudges starlight, warms planetary cores or even lodges in rocks â its ghostly influence could show up anywhere.
âAnything can be a dark matter detector,â Leane said. âYou just have to be creative enough to think of how to use it.â
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Correction: November 23, 2020
This article was revised to reflect that the next Sensei experiment will take place underground in Canada, not California as originally stated.
Wired has a detailed story about the ransomware attack on a Dusseldorf hospital, the one that resulted in an ambulance being redirected to a more distant hospital and the patient dying. The police wanted to prosecute the ransomware attackers for negligent homicide, but the details were more complicated:
After a detailed investigation involving consultations with medical professionals, an autopsy, and a minute-by-minute breakdown of events, Hartmann believes that the severity of the victimâs medical diagnosis at the time she was picked up was such that she would have died regardless of which hospital she had been admitted to. âThe delay was of no relevance to the final outcome,â Hartmann says. âThe medical condition was the sole cause of the death, and this is entirely independent from the cyberattack.â He likens it to hitting a dead body while driving: while you might be breaking the speed limit, youâre not responsible for the death.
So while this might not be an example of death by cyberattack, the article correctly notes that itâs only a matter of time:
But itâs only a matter of time, Hartmann believes, before ransomware does directly cause a death. âWhere the patient is suffering from a slightly less severe condition, the attack could certainly be a decisive factor,â he says. âThis is because the inability to receive treatment can have severe implications for those who require emergency services.â Success at bringing a charge might set an important precedent for future cases, thereby deepening the toolkit of prosecutors beyond the typical cybercrime statutes.
âThe main hurdle will be one of proof,â Urban says. âLegal causation will be there as soon as the prosecution can prove that the person died earlier, even if itâs only a few hours, because of the hack, but this is never easy to prove.â With the Düsseldorf attack, it was not possible to establish that the victim could have survived much longer, but in general itâs âabsolutely possibleâ that hackers could be found guilty of manslaughter, Urban argues.
And where causation is established, Hartmann points out that exposure for criminal prosecution stretches beyond the hackers. Instead, anyone who can be shown to have contributed to the hack may also be prosecuted, he says. In the Düsseldorf case, for example, his team was preparing to consider the culpability of the hospitalâs IT staff. Could they have better defended the hospital by monitoring the network more closely, for instance?
Itâs a short work week with the long holiday weekend ahead. Thanksgiving will be different. Our family intends to gather as usual except this year we will be dining in the barn. It wonât be as comfortable or convenient as usual, but this arrangement provides distancing and its outside. We got a healthy new grand baby this year so we have good reason to be thankful, but weâre all anxious to see 2020 expire so we can move on to (hopefully) better days ahead.
Making and breaking security go hand in hand. Iâve talked a lot about how Precursor, a mobile hardware development platform for secure applications, was made. In this post, I try to break it.
Hardware security is a multi-faceted problem. First, there is the question of âcan I trust this piece of hardware was built correctly?â; specifically, are there implants and back doors buried in the hardware? We refer to this as the âsupply chain problemâ. It is a particularly challenging problem, given the global nature of our supply chains, with parts pulled from the four corners of the world, passing through hundreds of hands before reaching our doorstep. Precursor addresses this problem head-on with open, verifiable hardware: the keyboard, display, and motherboard are easy to access and visually inspect for correct construction. No factory or third-party tool is ever trusted with secret material. Precursor is capable of generating its own secret keys and sealing them within the hardware, without additional tools.
We also use a special kind of logic chip for the CPU â an FPGA â configured by the user, not the factory, to be exactly the CPU that the user specified. Crucially, most users have no evidence-based reason to trust that a CPU contains exactly what it claims to contain; few have the inspection capability to verify a chip in a non-destructive manner. On the other hand, with an FPGA, individual users can craft and inspect CPU bitstreams with readily available tools. Furthermore, the design can be modified and upgraded to incorporate countermeasures against hardware exploits discovered in the FPGAâs underlying fabric. In other words, the current trustability situation for an ASIC-style CPU is basically âI surrenderâ, whereas with an FPGA, users have the power to configure and patch their CPUs.
See my previous post for more details on how an FPGA helps solve the problem of transparency in CPU designs
Trustable hardware is only one facet of hardware security. Beyond correct construction, there are also questions of âhas anyone tampered with the hardware while I wasnât looking?â, and âcan my hardware keep its secrets if it falls into the wrong hands?â These are the âtamper evidenceâ and âtamper resistanceâ problems, respectively. The rest of this post will drill down into these two questions as they relate to Precursor.
Despite any claims you may have heard otherwise, tamper resistance is a largely unsolved problem. Any secrets committed to a non-volatile format are vulnerable to recovery by a sufficiently advanced adversary. The availability of near-atomic level microscopy, along with sophisticated photon and phonon based probing techniques, means that a lab equipped with a few million dollars worth of top-notch gear and well-trained technicians has a good chance of recovering secret key material out of virtually any non-volatile storage media. The hard part is figuring out where the secrets are located on the chip. Once this is known for a given make and model, the attack is easy to repeat. This means the incremental cost of recovering keys from a previously studied design is in the ballpark of $10kâs and a matter of days. For some popular types of silicon packaging, such as flip chips, so-called âback side probingâ techniques may be able to non-destructively extract secret key material within a matter of hours.
Ptychographic X-ray imaging as referenced in this article reveals the detailed 3-D structure of a modern chip.
Keys stored in volatile memory â that is, battery-backed RAM â can significantly up the ante because any disruption of power to the key memory can disrupt its data. Cryogenic freezing of the circuitry can help preserve the data for readout in the event of power loss, but battery-backed key storage can also incorporate active countermeasures to detect environmental anomalies and reactively zeroize the keys. While this sounds great for storing extremely sensitive secrets, itâs also extremely risky because false triggers can erase the keys, millions of dollars of cryptocurrency could vanish with a single false move. Thus volatile keys are best suited for securing highly sensitive but ephemeral communications and not for the long-term storage of high-value secrets.
Tamper evidence, not to be confused with tamper resistance, is the ability of a secured hardware device to show evidence of tampering. An example of very basic tamper evidence is the âwarranty void if removedâ sticker. It is typically placed over a screw essential to holding the case together, so that any attempt to disassemble the unit requires puncturing the sticker. This very basic measure is easily defeated by duplicating and replacing the sticker, and itâs not hard to acquire even the holographic stickers if you know the right people.
The next level up in tamper evidence is the incorporation of a physically unclonable feature in the tamper-evident seal, such as meauring the random pattern of fibers in the paper of the sticker, or recording the position of glittery bits embedded in nail polish applied over a seam. Of course, none of these physical features can attest to any evidence of side-channel attacks, which do not require opening the case. In the case of side channel attacks, adversaries can gain enough information about secrets contained within a piece of hardware by just observing patterns in the power consumption or in the spurious radio waves emitted from the hardware. Attackers can also induce transient faults with the hope of tricking a device into disclosing secrets without breaking through labels by exposing the hardware to high levels of radiation or temperature extremes. Depending on the threat model, the hardware may simply need to hamper such attacks, or it may need to react to them and take appropriate action depending upon the nature of the attack.
Because hardware security is hard, the lack of a known exploit should never be taken as the existence of strong security. We take this fact to heart in Precursor: in addition to putting effort into designing a trustable, secured hardware solution, we have also put effort into exploiting it. Unlike most other secure hardware vendors, we also tell you about the exploits in detail, so you can make an informed decision about the practical limits of our implementationâs tamper evidence and resistance.
Precursor uses the Xilinx 7-series of FPGAs for its trusted root. This series of FPGAs is perhaps one of the most extensively studied from a security perspective; dozens of papers have been published about its architecture and vulnerabilities. As a result, its key stores have been reverse engineered and analyzed down to the transistor level.
An example of the analysis done by other researchers on the 7-Series FPGAs
The most serious known vulnerability in the chip was published in early 2020, by Maik Ender, Amir Moradi, and Christof Paar in a paper titled âThe Unpatchable Silicon: A Full Break of the Bitstream Encryption of the 7-Series FPGAsâ. In a nutshell, it allows an attacker equipped with nothing more than the ciphertext of the bitstream and access to the FPGAâs JTAG port to recover the plaintext of a bitstream. It relies on a feature known as the WBSTAR register, normally used to recover from a corrupted boot. By design, it loads a recovery address from a location encrypted in the bitstream, and places the address in a register that is necessarily disclosed to the boot media to set a new loading location for the fallback image. Unfortunately, the ârecovery addressâ is just a piece of data at the pointy end of an unchecked pointer. This means it can be used to fetch one word of plaintext from anywhere in the bitstream. The attack also takes advantage of the malleability of AES CBC blocks to adjust the WBSTAR load offset, thus allowing the FPGA to be used as an âoracleâ to decrypt ciphertext one word at a time, without any knowledge of the encryption key.
The paper suggested a mitigation involving a pair of pins on the FPGA that change value based on the contents of the WBSTAR register to trigger a key reset (assuming youâve stored the key in battery-backed RAM and not burned it permanently into the chip). While trying to implement the proposed mitigation, we found several ways to easily circumvent it. In particular, the external pin update is not automatic, it is done by an additional command later in the bitstream. By just omitting the pin updating command, we can render this mitigation ineffective without affecting the ability to read out the plaintext. We have published the code necessary to reproduce this attack in our jtag-trace github repository.
This means that the tamper resistance of Precursor is equivalent to the strength of the glue applied over the SPI ROM chip and the JTAG port. The glue on the SPI ROM chip hampers the recovery of the ciphertext, necessary for the attack, while gluing the JTAG port shut hampers the upload of exploit code. Furthermore, the ciphertext should be treated as a secret, as knowledge of it is necessary for recovery of the plaintext. Therefore, the FPGA should still be burned with an encryption key and set to only accept encrypted bitstreams. This is because JTAG readout of the SPI ROM ciphertext can only happen with the help of a bitstream specifically crafted for the purpose. As long as such a bitstream is not encrypted to the secret key inside the FPGA, the ciphertext should be unavailable through the JTAG port.
Based on this evaluation, weâre planning on implementing the circuitry necessary to zeroize RAM-backed encryption keys, but not for the purpose of directly mitigating this exploit. Unfortunately, a separate oversight in the security features of the 7-Series means devices that boot from BBRAM must also accept unencrypted bitstreams. Therefore access to ciphertext is much easier on BBRAM-keyed devices than on devices that boot from fused keys. However, by including the BBRAM key zeroization circuitry, users could at least have a choice of which type of key (battery-backed or fused) to use, depending on their risk profile. Battery-backed keys complicate any hardware attack by requiring the hardware to receive uninterrupted power as it is disassembled, in exchange for the risk of key loss in case the user forgets to keep the battery charged. Fortunately, the power needed to preserve the key is miniscule, lower than the self-discharge current of the battery itself. Itâs also useful for users who wish to have a âself-destruct timerâ or âpanic buttonâ to completely, securely, and irrevocably wipe their devices in a fraction of a second. This is useful for protecting high-value secrets that have a short or pre-determined lifetime.
A schematic of Precursorâs proposed BBRAM key zeroization circuit. It is a pair of back-to-back NMOS-style inverters, which latches the system into a shutdown state until the battery is removed. There are additional circuits provisioned to rapidly discharge key-related voltage rails, not shown here.
Once Precursor has been glued shut, we propose the easiest method to recover the ciphertext and to gain access to the JTAG ports is to put the Precursor device into a precision CNC milling machine, mill out the PCB from the back side, and then place the remaining assembly into a pogo-pin based mechanism to perform the readout. This of course destroys the Precursor device in the process, but it is probably the most direct and reliable method of recovering the encryption keys, as it is very similar to an existing technique used for certain types of attacks on iPhones. Storing keys in BBRAM can greatly complicate the task of milling out the PCB by creating a high risk of accidental key erasure, but a sufficiently precise CNC with a non-conductive ceramic bit, or a precision laser-based ablation milling system can reduce the risk of key loss substantially. Cryogenic cooling of the FPGA chip itself may also help to preserve key material in the case of very short accidental power glitches.
CNC milling machines can be used to perform precision attacks on dense circuit boards. Above is a vendor demo of a CNC milling bit removing a NAND chip from an iPhone motherboard, without damage to adjacent components. The mill can be readily purchased for a couple thousand USD.
The level of equipment and skill required to execute such attacks is higher than available in a typical Makerspace or government field office, but could be made available within a specialized lab of any modern intelligence agency or large technology corporation. Of course, if Precursors became a popular method to store high-value secrets, an entrepreneurial hacker could also start a lucrative service to recover keys from devices with just a couple hundred thousand dollars in startup capital.
That being said, such an attack would likely be noticed. In other words, if your device is functional and its seals intact, your Precuror has probably not been tampered with. But, if it is confiscated or stolen, you can assume its secrets could be extracted in as little as a few hours by a well-prepared adversary. This is not ideal, but this barrier is still higher than countless other âsecured systemsâ ranging from from game consoles to smartphones to crypto wallets that can be broken with nothing more than a data cable and a laptop. Of course, these âeasy breaksâ are typically due to a bug in the firmware of the device, but unlike most of these devices Precursorâs firmware is patchable, as well as being completely open for audit.
To assist users with gluing their Precursors shut, we include an easy-to-mix two-part epoxy in the box so that users may âpotâ their boards once they have inspected their device and are satisfied it meets their standard for correct construction. Remember, we donât seal the boards in the factory because that makes it impossible for users to confirm no back doors were inserted into the hardware. Upon completing inspection of the hardware, we recommend users perform the following actions to permanently seal their Precursor systems:
Precursor is designed to have the âTrustedâ zone covered with a metal shield that can be glued down with epoxy.
The main risk of applying the epoxy is it leaking onto a connector that should not be glued down. The board is laid out to avoid that outcome, but caution is still needed during sealing. Pouring too much glue into the metal lid can result in glue leaking onto connectors that should not be sealed, preventing re-assembly. Notably, the sealing is done at the userâs risk; once a sealing attempt has been made, we canât repair or replace a unit since the epoxy is unremovable by design.
The purpose of the tissue paper is to provide a simple but memorable way to confirm the uniqueness of your Precursor unit. It relies upon a humanâs innate ability to recognize drawings or lettering made with their own hand. This method allows verification of the seal with simple visual inspection, instead of relying upon a third party tool to, for example, record and analyze the position of glitter dots or paper fibers for authenticity.
We provide Epotek 301 âBi-packsâ as the two-part epoxy for potting Precursor devices. It is commonly used for encapsulating optoelectronics and semiconductors such as LEDs and sensors. As such, it has excellent electrical properties, good optical clarity, robust mechanical durability, and a suitable viscosity for penetrating the nooks and crannies of small electronic parts. Once cured, any attempt to physically access the electronics contained within will leave some kind of mark as evidence of the attempt.
The Precursor device has a well-characterized hardware security level. Weâve designed the hardware to be easier to inspect and seal, so you have an evidenced-based reason to trust the hardware. As all devices are vulnerable to hardware tampering, weâve taken the approach of preferring devices with well-characterized vulnerabilities. We picked the Xilinx 7-Series FPGAs in part because it has been studied for years: its fuse boxes and encryption engine have been analyzed down to the gate level and there have been no findings so far reporting special access modes for law enforcement, undocumented shadow key stores, or other bugs that could lead to fully remote exploits or back doors. Weâve also taken the time to reproduce and disclose the known vulnerabilities, so that you donât have to trust our statements about the security of the hardware: youâre empowered to reproduce our findings and make your own evidence-based findings about the trustworthiness of Precursor. In parallel with Precursor, the Betrusted project aims to raise the bar even higher, but doing so will require fabricating a custom ASIC, which incidentally carries its own set of verifiability and supply chain risks that we hope to address with countermeasures that are beyond the scope of this post.
In the end, there is no such thing as perfect security, but we firmly believe that the best mitigation is an evidence-based ecosystem built around the principles of openness, transparency, and lots and lots of testing. If youâre interested in participating in our ecosystem, please visit the Precursor crowdfunding page.
Computer programming, especially in source code, is an expressive form of communication. As such, U.S. law recognizes that communication in the form of source code is protected as freedom of speech by the First Amendment. Recently, Judge G. Murray Snow got this only two-thirds right in a ruling in the U.S. District Court in Arizona. In the case of CDK Global v. Brnovich, his denial of a motion to dismiss reads (in part),
It is well-established that âcomputer code, and computer programs constructed from code can merit First Amendment protection.â Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley, 273 F.3d 429, 449 (2d Cir. 2001); see also United States v. Elcom Ltd., 203 F. Supp. 2d 1111, 1127 (N.D. Cal. 2002) (â[c]omputer software is. . . speech that is protected at some level by the First Amendmentâ). However, not all code rises to the level of protected speech under the First Amendment. Corley, 273 F.3d at 449. Rather, there are âtwo ways in which a programmer might be said to communicate through code: to the user of the program (not necessarily protected) and to the computer (never protected).â Id. Further, even where code communicates to the user of a program, it still may not constitute protected speech under the First Amendment if it âcommands `mechanicallyâ and `without the intercession of the mind or the will of the recipient,'â Id. (describing the holding of Commodity Futures Trading Commân v. Vartuli, 228 F.3d 94 (2d Cir. 2000)).
(emphasis added)
But there is a third way that programmers communicate through code, even more important (for First Amendment protection) than those two ways; and if Judge Snow had read two more sentences in the Corley opinion that he cites, he would have found it: the âthird manner in which a programmer might communicate through code: to another programmer.â Id. Specifically,
Instructions such as computer code, which are intended to be executable by a computer, will often convey information capable of comprehension and assessment by a human being. A programmer reading a program learns information about instructing a computer, and might use this information to improve personal programming skills and perhaps the craft of programming. Moreover, programmers communicating ideas to one another almost inevitably communicate in code, much as musicians use notes. Limiting First Amendment protection of programmers to descriptions of computer code (but not the code itself) would impede discourse among computer scholars, just as limiting protection for musicians to descriptions of musical scores (but not sequences of notes) would impede their exchange of ideas and expression. Instructions that communicate information comprehensible to a human qualify as speech whether the instructions are designed for execution by a computer or a human (or both).
Corley, Id., at 448.
Indeed, when I teach software engineering to undergraduates, I make this very important point: your computer programs do not only execute on a computer, they must be readable and understandable to humans. A successful program will endure, and must be maintained by people who, perforce, will need to understand it. Elements of Programming Style are just as essential in coding as the Elements of Style are in other writing.
One cannot blame Judge Snow: his ruling is a very brief Order denying a motion to dismiss. And perhaps the Plaintiffsâ brief missed this point as well. Still the law (the Corley precedent) is clear: There are at least three ways that source code communicates, and one of those ways is that people can read it and learn how it works.
Regarding the underlying case, CDK Global v. Mark Brnovich et al. and Arizona Automobile Dealers Association, it is not clear whether the First Amendment claims will outweigh the interests of the state in regulating commerce. The Courtâs ruling summarizes the case,
Plaintiffs CDK Global LLC ⦠develop, own, and operate proprietary computer systems known as dealer management systems (âDMSsâ) that process vast amounts of data sourced from various parties. Automotive dealerships hold licenses to DMSs to help manage their business operations, including handling confidential consumer and proprietary data, processing transactions, and managing data communications between dealers, customers, car manufacturers, credit bureaus, and other third parties. Plaintiffs employ multiple technological measuresâsuch as secure login credentials, CAPTCHA prompts, and comprehensive cybersecurity infrastructure, hardware, and softwareâto safeguard their DMS systems from unauthorized access or breach. Plaintiffs also contractually prohibit dealers from granting third parties access to their DMSs without Plaintiffsâ authorization.
In March 2019, the Arizona Legislature passed the Dealer Data Security Law (âthe Dealer Lawâ). The Dealer Law regulates the relationship between DMS licensers like Plaintiffs and the dealerships they serve. Under the Dealer Law, DMS providers may no longer â[p]rohibit[] a third party [that has been authorized by the Dealer and] that has satisfied or is compliant with. . . current, applicable security standards published by the standards for technology in automotive retail [(STAR standards)]. . . from integrating into the dealerâs [DMS] or plac[e] an unreasonable restriction on integration. . . .â The Dealer Law also requires that DMS providers â[a]dopt and make available a standardized framework for the exchange, integration and sharing of data from [a DMS]â that is compatible with STAR standards and that they â[p]rovide access to open application programming interfaces to authorized integrators.â Finally, a DMS provider may only use data to the extent permitted in the DMS providerâs agreement with the dealer, must permit dealer termination of such agreement, and âmust work to ensure a secure transition of all protected dealer data to a successor dealer data vendor or authorized integratorâ upon termination. Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. §§ 28-4654(B)(1)-(3).
(internal citations omitted)
Plaintiffs argue that Arizonaâs requirement to modify their software to permit interoperability is âcompelled speechâ (in the form of computer code that they must write), which is a violation of the First Amendment.
I am a bit skeptical of the Plaintiffsâ argument, because this case is not really about communication, itâs about operation. That is, in the CDK Global case, we need not analyze whether prior restraints on distribution of software would violate the First Amendment, because itâs not really about distribution of software. Itâs about the execution of software by car dealers. Arizona is really saying, âif a car dealer uses DMS software in the course of selling cars, then the DMS software must interoperate in certain ways.â Operation of a computer program is not necessarily protected by the First Amendment, even if communication of a computer program to another person might be.
On the other hand, there are parallels between the Corley case (which was about restrictions on the distribution of software that would defeat copy-protection) and restrictions on the distribution of 3-d-printing files that would produce gun parts. Professor Eugene Volokh has analyzed âThree ways of thinking about [restrictions on distributing software in a First-Amendment context]: 1. Software is like hardware. 2. Software is like instruction manuals. 3. Alexa, read this book and make me a gun.â
Again, in this case, if a state regulates the operation of a 3-d printer (forbidding the production of gun parts) this may not conflict with the First Amendment (although it certainly relates to the Second Amendment); but regulating the communication of 3-d-printer files for gun parts may have First-Amendment implications.
Caution: I am not a lawyer. No warrantee is implied on these legal opinions.
Iâm tracking an online petition conceived by Jorge Santiago Ortiz that challenges the National Science Foundation: Repair the Arecibo Observatory, do not decommission it. Given Fridayâs news of the planned shutdown due to problems with support cables and the dangers of possible repairs, itâs good to see an effort being made to explore the possible. Ortiz points out that the observatory employs more than 120 people, is visited by some 200 scientists every year working on research projects, and draws 100,000 visitors yearly from the general population.
I notice the petition is approaching 6,000 signatures this morning as people react to the Arecibo news. It is possible there is a path toward keeping the observatory alive? Also noted by Centauri Dreams reader Jeff Brandt, himself a resident of Puerto Rico, is an attempt to free the facility from National Science Foundation funding and repair the structure.
Brandt notes that Jenniffer González-Colón, Puerto Ricoâs representative in the US Congress, has sent a letter to the House & Senate Appropriations Committee requesting funding to stabilize the structure, as you can see below. Weâll keep an eye on both efforts.
Sent a letter w/ @RepStephMurphy & @RepDarrenSoto to the House & Senate Appropriations Committee requesting the necessary funds to safely stabilize the Arecibo telescope, a valuable scientific asset treasured by all Puerto Ricans & I'm committed to continuing work to preserve it. pic.twitter.com/pBwN3kumlw
â Jenniffer González (@RepJenniffer) November 20, 2020
It seems apropos in discussing Arecibo to give a nod to the Cornell connection, given the universityâs involvement in its inception and subsequent management. The radio telescope was conceived by Cornell professor William E. Gordon, while its early scientific investigations were coordinated by Thomas Gold, who created the Cornell Center for Radiophysics and Space Research. Looking back, the universityâs Jonathan Lunine comments on its significance:
âArecibo has been an incredibly productive facility for nearly 60 years. For the Cornell scientists and engineers who took a daring dream and realized it, for the scientists who made new discoveries with this uniquely powerful radio telescope and planetary radar, and for all the young people who were inspired to become scientists by the sight of this enormous telescope in the middle of the island of Puerto Rico, Areciboâs end is an inestimable loss.â
Which brings me to Henry Cordova, who has graced these pages before with his SETI Reality Check, and who now looks back at a visit to Arecibo in the observatoryâs early days in an essay that was written, I hasten to add, before the recent news of the siteâs decommissioning. Trained as an astronomer and mathematician, Henryâs interest in the ways in which we observe the stars continues unabated. Arecibo clearly called out the poetry in him, as it did in me.
by Henry Cordova
I visited Arecibo Observatory in 1971, I was in Puerto Rico on business, and I took a Sunday off to visit the place. Itâs a two hour drive from San Juan, and nestled in some pretty spectacular jungle-covered Karst topography: a very beautiful drive into an isolated and haunted countryside.
When I arrived the place was deserted. There was a small building, similar to a motel, where I supposed visiting researchers were quartered; but nobody was home. The permanent staff probably had houses in town (Arecibo proper is about a half-hour drive further north, on the coast). Next door, the control room was visible; through the locked glass doors I could see electronic equipment, powered up, but no one was there. Only my car was in the parking area. At the edge of the lot was a little observation platform where you could walk right up to the edge of the dish itself. It spread before me, filling a vast natural depression. The feeling was very much like standing at the edge of Meteor Crater in Arizona, except I could see suspended above me, on huge white towers, the receivers placed at the focus of the parabola.
The silence, the isolation, the grandeur of it all really affected me. The sheer audacity of the structure, the combination of natural beauty and technological brilliance was almost overpowering. I imagine it would be very similar to be standing alone at Stonehenge on a sunny windy day, accompanied only by ghosts.
Observatories are holy places. They are as impressive and beautiful as a medieval cathedral and by necessity are usually located in lonely and desolate landscapes. Like cathedrals, they are temples to the ineffable, to the incredibly remote, and to our faith in being able to connect with itâplaces of worship, in a way, sacred places. I know itâs sentimental and impractical of me, but if this site is to be abandoned, let it not be replaced with a farm or village or reservoir or some other practical symbol of the economy. Let it naturally decay into ruins, as a monument to our boldness, and to our stupidity. Centuries from now, men will stand in that place and say âwe once explored the stars from hereâ.
Missy and I have cats. We love our cats. I have also lived in homes with dogs. I loved them as well.
The best dog Iââ¬â¢ve ever known was a sixty-pound boxer named Stimpy who believed she was a lap dog. Not only was she just great company, but she also once bit the end off of a rubber squeaky toy and just sat there breathing through the whistle. She looked really pleased with herself.
As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).
From Barbouriâs Electronics Projects blog:
After finishing the IceTube clock version 1.31 build for myself, I was ready to work on the board design for some IceTube clocks as gifts. I could have used the existing V 1.31 boards, but I wanted to use an up to date design that incorporated all the hardware improvements over the past 10 years while still staying with a thru-hole design.
This updated design is based on jarchieâs (John Archie) xmas-icetube clock revision D board. He had incorporated most of the hardware features that I wanted for my new batch of clocks, along with a vastly improved firmware update.
One of the most important hardware improvements for me was the ability to properly drive the IV-18 tube to specifications (providing more even display illumination and preventing cathode poisoning). Some other features of the design are the inclusion of an one wire temperature sensor near the oscillator crystal to provide highly accurate temperature compensation of the crystal frequency, reset pull-up resistor, micro-controller power decoupling capacitor, GPS connection pads, along with an improved board layout while still maintaining physical compatibility with Ver. 1.X board switches and connectors.
Last week I signed on to two joint letters about the security of the 2020 election. The first was as one of 59 election security experts, basically saying that while the election seems to have been both secure and accurate (voter suppression notwithstanding), we still need to work to secure our election systems:
We are aware of alarming assertions being made that the 2020 election was âriggedâ by exploiting technical vulnerabilities. However, in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent. To our collective knowledge, no credible evidence has been put forth that supports a conclusion that the 2020 election outcome in any state has been altered through technical compromise.
That said, it is imperative that the US continue working to bolster the security of elections against sophisticated adversaries. At a minimum, all states should employ election security practices and mechanisms recommended by experts to increase assurance in election outcomes, such as post-election risk-limiting audits.
The New York Times wrote about the letter.
The second was a more general call for election security measures in the US:
Obviously elections themselves are partisan. But the machinery of them should not be. And the transparent assessment of potential problems or the assessment of allegations of security failure â even when they could affect the outcome of an election â must be free of partisan pressures. Bottom line: election security officials and computer security experts must be able to do their jobs without fear of retribution for finding and publicly stating the truth about the security and integrity of the election.
These pile on to the November 12 statement from Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the other agencies of the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) Executive Committee. While Iâm not sure how they have enough comparative data to claim that âthe November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,â they are certainly credible in saying that âthere is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.â
We have a long way to go to secure our election systems from hacking. Details of what to do are known. Getting rid of touch-screen voting machines is important, but baseless claims of fraud donât help.
Kansas is the 15th-largest state in the U.S. by area, and home to almost 3 million residents. Nearly 90 percent of the stateââ¬â¢s land is dedicated to agricultural use, carried out on some 59,500 farms. Here are a few glimpses of the landscape of Kansas, and some of the wildlife and people calling it home.
This photo story is part of Fifty, a collection of images from each of the United States.
Besides being an amplifier for idiots, Twitter can be a difficult way to communicate. For instance, some skill is required in order to accurately express yourself in a limited space, something I havenât mastered after more than a decade of trying.
Yesterday I posted an essay here suggesting there may be a lot of dormant amateur radio licensees in the US and that if the FCC were to impose that fifty-dollar fee thatâs been kicked around for new and renewing licenses, a significant number of those might think twice about renewing a license they donât use.
In order to promote that article to a wider audience I shared it via Twitter including a short snippet from the writing along with the link. I did this in hope of attracting an audience for the essay. That turned out to be a bad idea as it generated chatter on Twitter with few actually reading the article.
Without having read the article, the Twitter response was based on the snippet I included along with a dollop of simmering anger some enthusiasts harbor over the possibility of any fees for amateur licensing. The narrative was lost as the response went off-course and, in the end, had little to do with the point I tried to make.
This isnât a complaint, it was my fault and Iâve managed to learn something else from it. Does that ever stop?
But I will tell you that I find less value in Twitter as time grinds on. Iâve been wading in the tweetstream a long time and sometimes wonder why? The answer is that itâs been a good way to stay in touch with friends but I have to tell you, even that is beginning to wear thin and my days on the platform are limited.
Literally most of the tabs I have open right now, in front of you.
While launching crews into orbit has become routine with even commercial companies beginning to provide lift services for customers like the US government, it was far from routine decades ago during the opening years of the Space Age. At that time, teams of the best scientists and engineers in the US and the old Soviet Union struggled to develop and master the new technologies required to safely send people into space resulting in numerous failures. One of the most infamous of these failures was the launch abort of NASAâs Mercury-Redstone 1 which was meant to test the rocket and spacecraft which would send the first Americans into space.
Artist concept of the Mercury capsule with its launch escape system. (NASA)
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Begun shortly after its founding in October 1958, the goal of NASAâs Project Mercury was to send a single astronaut into orbit using a modified version of the Atlas D ICBM â the largest rocket the US had available at the time (see âThe Origins of NASAâs Mercury Programâ). As the end of 1960 was approaching, NASA had already launched a pair of test flights of the Mercury-Atlas with less than stellar results. The first test flight launched on September 8, 1959, dubbed âBig Joeâ, used a modified production Atlas D to launch a boilerplate Mercury capsule on a suborbital test flight. Although significant problems were encountered with the launch vehicle and the spacecraft, most of the flightâs objectives were met including testing Mercuryâs then-innovative ablative heat shield during reentry into the atmosphere (see âGiving Mercury Its Wings: The First Test Flights of NASAâs Mercury Programâ). The second test flight, Mercury-Atlas 1 (abbreviated MA-1), was launched on July 28, 1960 carrying the first production Mercury capsule for its first flight into space. Unfortunately, the Atlas 50D launch vehicle disintegrated during ascent less then a minute after launch (see âThe Disappointing Flight of NASAâs Mercury-Atlas 1â).
The launch of Mercury-Atlas 1 from LC-14 on July 29, 1960. (NASA)
As NASA and the prime contractor of the Atlas, Convair, struggled to correct the problems uncovered by these test flights, focus turned to the first test flight of the Mercury-Redstone. The Redstone, which was only a quarter of the size of the Atlas, was intended to boost the manned Mercury spacecraft for 15-minute suborbital test flights which would precede the manned orbital flights. This would allow not only the spacecraft but its pilot to be evaluated during brief periods of weightlessness before committing to the longer orbital missions.
A comparison of the Redstone missile, the Jupiter-C/Juno I and Redstone Mercury Launch Vehicle. (NASA/MSFC)
The Chrysler-built Redstone was a short range tactical missile developed by a team at the ABMA (Army Ballistic Missile Agency) in Huntsville, Alabama under the direction of Wernher von Braun (see âRedstone: The Missile that Launched America into Spaceâ). Since its inception in August 1953, the Redstone had been developed into a highly reliable rocket. A modified version of the Redstone was used by the von Braun and his team as the basis of the Jupiter-C/Juno I launch vehicle that sent Americaâs first satellite into orbit (see âExplorer 1: Americaâs First Satelliteâ). The version of the Redstone to be used for the Mercury program, known as the Redstone MRLV (Mercury Redstone Launch Vehicle), started with the Redstone variant with the stretched propellant tanks used on the Juno I rocket. But instead of using the highly corrosive and toxic Hydyne as a fuel, the Redstone MRLV reverted to the lower-performance (and safer) 75% ethanol mixture in combination with liquid oxygen (LOX) used in the production Redstone model. These propellants would feed a Rocketdyne A-7 engine (the latest version being used on production Redstone missiles) to generate 350 kilonewtons of thrust for about 145 seconds. The MRLV-variant of the Redstone was 1.8 meters in diameter and stood 25.4 meters tall with a launch mass of about 30 metric tons. In all, a total of 800 changes would be made to the Redstone to make it suitable for supporting crewed flights.
Diagram of the Redstone MRLV. Click on image to enlarge. (NASA)
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Just as with the earlier MA-1 mission, the first Mercury-Redstone mission (dubbed âMercury-Redstone 1â or âMR-1â) used a production Mercury spacecraft manufactured by McDonnell Aircraft Corporation in St. Louis. Spacecraft No. 2 was assigned to the MR-1 mission and would include all of the systems need for an crewed mission, unlike Spacecraft No. 4 flown on MA-1 which did not include critical items like life support or an attitude control system. Unlike the orbital versions of the Mercury spacecraft which used an ablative heat shield, Spacecraft No. 2 was fitted with a 1.89-meter in diameter beryllium heatsink like the other suborbital Mercury capsule variants since the total reentry heat load during the suborbital missions was only 2% that for a return from orbit. The spacecraft was instrumented to monitor its systems and transmit telemetry live or record it onboard along with a 16 mm movie camera which would monitor the instrument panel readings during flight. Also carried was a 70 mm camera to document the view out of the capsuleâs porthole and a cosmic ray film pack to measure exposure during the flight. The total launch mass of Spacecraft No. 2 was 1,290 kilograms, not including the launch escape tower.
Mercury Spacecraft No. 2 (in front) shown during assembly at McDonnell in St. Louis before its flight on Mercury-Redstone 1. (Boeing)
The plan for the Mercury-Redstone 1 mission was to launch the Mercury spacecraft into a suborbital trajectory with an apogee of 209 kilometers which would then reenter the atmosphere to splashdown 378 kilometers downrange in the Atlantic after a flight of 15.8 minutes. The objectives of this test flight included testing the Mercury spacecraft during about 5.2 minutes of weightlessness followed by a reentry with peak braking loads of about 11 g. The retrograde rockets, used to return a Mercury capsule from orbit, would be tested in flight for the first time during this mission as would the smaller posigrade rockets used to separate the capsule from it launch vehicle. Production-model descent and recovery systems would be tested as well. This would also be the first spaceflight of the Mercury to include the 468-kilogram launch escape tower which would be used to pull the Mercury capsule safely away from its launch vehicle in case of an abort during ascent.
A schematic showing the typical suborbital trajectory of the Mercury-Redstone. Click on image to enlarge. (NASA)
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When Mercury program managers drew up its first test schedule in January 1959, the Mercury-Redstone 1 flight was optimistically penciled in for launch in October 1959. Delays in spacecraft construction and certification eventually pushed this overly ambitious launch date out a whole year. In the mean time, pressure on Project Mercury only increased when the Soviet Union launched a prototypes of its crewed spacecraft in 1960 (see âKorabl-Sputnik & The Origin of the Soviet Vostok Programâ and âKorabl-Sputnik 2: The First Animals Recovered From Orbitâ), not to mention the failure of Mercury-Atlas 1.
The first piece of mission hardware to arrive at Cape Canaveral was Spacecraft No. 2 on July 23, 1960 after it had completed three weeks of tests with its assigned Redstone MRLV, designated âMR-1â, at the ABMA facilities in Huntsville, Alabama (which was formally transferred to NASA to become the Marshall Space Flight Center on July 1). Extensive reworking of various spacecraft systems was required as the fully-functional capsule was checked out at the Cape for its mission. In the mean time, the MR-1 launch vehicle arrived at the Cape on August 3 and, following its preflight checkout, was erected on the pad at Launch Complex 5 (LC-5) on August 22. Following being placed into temporary storage as Tropical Storm Florence passed Florida, MR-1 was re-erected at LC-5 on September 26 followed by the first mating of Spacecraft No. 2.
Spacecraft No. 2 shown being raised for mating with MR-1 at LC-5 in preparation for the Mercury-Redstone 1 mission. (NASA)
Following initial systems checks, the capsule was demated for additional work to correct ongoing problems. With this work completed on October 7, a launch date of November 7 was set. On October 24, MR-1 and Spacecraft No. 2 were mated for a second time with the final mating, following minor modifications and preparing the capsule for flight, taking place on October 31. The first launch attempt on November 7 was scrubbed at the T-22 minute mark when a leak developed in the capsuleâs hydrogen peroxide-fueled attitude control system. The spacecraft was subsequently removed and sent back to the hanger so that the attitude control systemâs helium relief valve and its toroidal hydrogen peroxide tank could be replaced.
Mercury-Redstone 1 shown being prepared for launch. (NASA)
With repairs completed, Spacecraft No. 2 was mated with MR-1 for a final time for a launch attempt on November 21. The countdown proceeded normally save for a one-hour hold to fix yet another, this time minor, leak in the hydrogen peroxide system. At 8:59 AM EST, the A-7 rocket engine of MR-1 ignited and began to lift off of its launch pedestal at LC-5. But to the horror of the personnel in the blockhouse monitoring the launch, the Redstoneâs main engine shutdown almost immediately with the fully loaded launch vehicle settling back on its pedestal after rising a mere ten centimeters. As everyone held their breath, the launch escape tower was jettisoned followed by the deployment of the spacecraftâs drogue chute three seconds later then its main and reserve parachutes. Fortunately, the spacecraftâs posigrade and retrograde motors did not fire probably avoiding a pad explosion in the process.
The launch escape tower on Mercury-Redstone 1 being jettisoned after the rocket shutdown its main engine and settled back on its launch pedestal. (NASA)
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While the Mercury-Redstone 1 stack seemed safe at the moment, a debate broke out about what to do with the fully fueled, live rocket whose destruct system and other pyrotechnics were still live. In the end it was decided to do nothing until the following morning allowing the battery in the booster destruct system to deplete itself as well as the LOX in the Redstone to boil off. With the spacecraft relatively safe, crews carefully moved on November 22 to drain the ethanol from the rocket and roll the gantry back into place to safe the stack and evaluate the hardware. Except for the deployment of its parachutes, Spacecraft No. 2 was undamaged and could be reflown after being serviced. The MR-1 launch vehicle, however, damaged its fins (upon which the rocket sat) and there were signs of minor buckling in the skin of the rocket. MR-1 was removed from the pad and returned to Huntsville for a fuller evaluation and repair for potential reflight. The launch escape tower had buried itself in the sand 360 meters from the launch site after it had reach a peak altitude of 1,200 meters.
Workers shown next to the launch escape tower buried in the sand 360 meters from the launch site. (NASA)
Within two days, the investigation of this demoralizing failure had determined the cause of the malfunction and the reasons for the subsequent events. The problem was traced to a pair of electrical connectors located at Redstoneâs Fin II at the base of the rocket which had disconnected at launch in an order that was reversed from a normal Redstone launch. Normally during launch, a 60-pin control connector unplugs before a four-pin power connector. During the erection and alignment of MR-1, a longer control cable from a tactical Redstone missile was substituted for the specially manufactured short cable meant for use on the Redstone MRLV. While the longer cable was blocked and clamped to shorten it, it was not shortened by enough. Because of the improper mechanical adjustments, the power plug disconnected 29 milliseconds before the control plug allowing 3 amps of current to flow inadvertently through engineâs ânormal cutoffâ relay for 40 milliseconds instead of to ground as would normally happen when the rocket was on the pad. This caused the engine to shutdown and triggered the automatic jettisoning of the launch escape tower. With the capsuleâs recovery system now also armed, the barostatic switch which would trigger the deployment of the drogue chute at 12,800 meters was tripped followed by the main parachute which was triggered to deploy at 3,000 meters. Fortunately the 0.25 g gravity switches which inhibit the firing of the posigrade and retrograde motors were still active averting a total disaster.
Diagram showing the placement of the power and control connectors on the Redstone launch pedestal on Fin II (on right). A ground strap (indicated) was added after the failure to Mercury-Redstone 1 to prevent a recurrence of its launch abort. Click on image to enlarge. (NASA)
With the cause of the failure found, changes were made to the Redstone, its launch pedestal, Mercury spacecraft as well as ground procedures to prevent a recurrence of the problem. Spacecraft No. 2 was refurbished and replacement hardware diverted to support another launch attempt for âMercury-Redstone 1Aâ scheduled for December 19.
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Follow Drew Ex Machina on Facebook.
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âRedstone: The Missile that Launched America into Spaceâ, Drew Ex Machina, April 26, 2016 [Post]
âThe Disappointing Flight of NASAâs Mercury-Atlas 1â, Drew Ex Machina, July 29, 2020 [Post]
âGiving Mercury Its Wings: The First Test Flights of NASAâs Mercury Programâ, Drew Ex Machina, September 9, 2019 [Post]
âThe Origins of NASAâs Mercury Programâ, Drew Ex Machina, December 17, 2018 [Post]
Â
Jerome B. Hammack and Jack C. Haberlick, âThe Mercury-Redstone Programâ, American Rocket Society Space Flight Report to the Nation (New York Coliseum; October 9-15, 1961), 1961
Loyd S. Swenson Jr., James M. Grimwood and Charles C. Alexander, This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, NASA SP-4201, 1966
âFirst Mercury-Redstone Flight Test Fails on Padâ, Aviation Week & Space Technology, Vol. 73, No. 22, pp. 28-29, November 28, 1960
âSecond MR-1 Test Planned in Two Weeksâ, Aviation Week & Space Technology, Vol. 73, No. 23, pp. 30-32, December 5, 1960
Mercury Capsule No. 2 Configuration Specification (Mercury-Redstone No. 1), Report No. 6603-2, McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, Revised February 6, 1961
The Mercury-Redstone Project, TMX-53107, NASA MSFC, December 1964
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Fraudsters redirected email and web traffic destined for several cryptocurrency trading platforms over the past week. The attacks were facilitated by scams targeting employees at GoDaddy, the worldâs largest domain name registrar, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.
The incident is the latest incursion at GoDaddy that relied on tricking employees into transferring ownership and/or control over targeted domains to fraudsters. In March, a voice phishing scam targeting GoDaddy support employees allowed attackers to assume control over at least a half-dozen domain names, including transaction brokering site escrow.com.
And in May of this year, GoDaddy disclosed that 28,000 of its customersâ web hosting accounts were compromised following a security incident in Oct. 2019 that wasnât discovered until April 2020.
This latest campaign appears to have begun on or around Nov. 13, with an attack on cryptocurrency trading platform liquid.com.
âA domain hosting provider âGoDaddyâ that manages one of our core domain names incorrectly transferred control of the account and domain to a malicious actor,â Liquid CEO Mike Kayamori said in a blog post. âThis gave the actor the ability to change DNS records and in turn, take control of a number of internal email accounts. In due course, the malicious actor was able to partially compromise our infrastructure, and gain access to document storage.â
In the early morning hours of Nov. 18 Central European Time (CET), cyptocurrency mining service NiceHash disccovered that some of the settings for its domain registration records at GoDaddy were changed without authorization, briefly redirecting email and web traffic for the site. NiceHash froze all customer funds for roughly 24 hours until it was able to verify that its domain settings had been changed back to their original settings.
âAt this moment in time, it looks like no emails, passwords, or any personal data were accessed, but we do suggest resetting your password and activate 2FA security,â the company wrote in a blog post.
NiceHash founder Matjaz Skorjanc said the unauthorized changes were made from an Internet address at GoDaddy, and that the attackers tried to use their access to its incoming NiceHash emails to perform password resets on various third-party services, including Slack and Github. But he said GoDaddy was impossible to reach at the time because it was undergoing a widespread system outage in which phone and email systems were unresponsive.
âWe detected this almost immediately [and] started to mitigate [the] attack,â Skorjanc said in an email to this author. âLuckily, we fought them off well and they did not gain access to any important service. Nothing was stolen.â
Skorjanc said NiceHashâs email service was redirected to privateemail.com, an email platform run by Namecheap Inc., another large domain name registrar. Using Farsight Security, a service which maps changes to domain name records over time, KrebsOnSecurity instructed the service to show all domains registered at GoDaddy that had alterations to their email records in the past week which pointed them to privateemail.com. Those results were then indexed against the top one million most popular websites according to Alexa.com.
The result shows that several other cryptocurrency platforms also may have been targeted by the same group, including Bibox.com, Celsius.network, and Wirex.app. None of these companies responded to requests for comment.
In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, GoDaddy acknowledged that âa small numberâ of customer domain names had been modified after a âlimitedâ number of GoDaddy employees fell for a social engineering scam. GoDaddy said the outage between 7:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. PST on Nov. 17 was not related to a security incident, but rather a technical issue that materialized during planned network maintenance.
âSeparately, and unrelated to the outage, a routine audit of account activity identified potential unauthorized changes to a small number of customer domains and/or account information,â GoDaddy spokesperson Dan Race said. âOur security team investigated and confirmed threat actor activity, including social engineering of a limited number of GoDaddy employees.â
âWe immediately locked down the accounts involved in this incident, reverted any changes that took place to accounts, and assisted affected customers with regaining access to their accounts,â GoDaddyâs statement continued. âAs threat actors become increasingly sophisticated and aggressive in their attacks, we are constantly educating employees about new tactics that might be used against them and adopting new security measures to prevent future attacks.â
Race declined to specify how its employees were tricked into making the unauthorized changes, saying the matter was still under investigation. But in the attacks earlier this year that affected escrow.com and several other GoDaddy customer domains, the assailants targeted employees over the phone, and were able to read internal notes that GoDaddy employees had left on customer accounts.
Whatâs more, the attack on escrow.com redirected the site to an Internet address in Malaysia that hosted fewer than a dozen other domains, including the phishing website servicenow-godaddy.com. This suggests the attackers behind the March incident â and possibly this latest one â succeeded by calling GoDaddy employees and convincing them to use their employee credentials at a fraudulent GoDaddy login page.
In August 2020, KrebsOnSecurity warned about a marked increase in large corporations being targeted in sophisticated voice phishing or âvishingâ scams. Experts say the success of these scams has been aided greatly by many employees working remotely thanks to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic.
A typical vishing scam begins with a series of phone calls to employees working remotely at a targeted organization. The phishers often will explain that theyâre calling from the employerâs IT department to help troubleshoot issues with the companyâs email or virtual private networking (VPN) technology.
The goal is to convince the target either to divulge their credentials over the phone or to input them manually at a website set up by the attackers that mimics the organizationâs corporate email or VPN portal.
On July 15, a number of high-profile Twitter accounts were used to tweet out a bitcoin scam that earned more than $100,000 in a few hours. According to Twitter, that attack succeeded because the perpetrators were able to social engineer several Twitter employees over the phone into giving away access to internal Twitter tools.
An alert issued jointly by the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) says the perpetrators of these vishing attacks compile dossiers on employees at their targeted companies using mass scraping of public profiles on social media platforms, recruiter and marketing tools, publicly available background check services, and open-source research.
The FBI/CISA advisory includes a number of suggestions that companies can implement to help mitigate the threat from vishing attacks, including:
⢠Restrict VPN connections to managed devices only, using mechanisms like hardware checks or installed certificates, so user input alone is not enough to access the corporate VPN.
⢠Restrict VPN access hours, where applicable, to mitigate access outside of allowed times.
⢠Employ domain monitoring to track the creation of, or changes to, corporate, brand-name domains.
⢠Actively scan and monitor web applications for unauthorized access, modification, and anomalous activities.
⢠Employ the principle of least privilege and implement software restriction policies or other controls; monitor authorized user accesses and usage.
⢠Consider using a formalized authentication process for employee-to-employee communications made over the public telephone network where a second factor is used to
authenticate the phone call before sensitive information can be discussed.
⢠Improve 2FA and OTP messaging to reduce confusion about employee authentication attempts.
⢠Verify web links do not have misspellings or contain the wrong domain.
⢠Bookmark the correct corporate VPN URL and do not visit alternative URLs on the sole basis of an inbound phone call.
⢠Be suspicious of unsolicited phone calls, visits, or email messages from unknown individuals claiming to be from a legitimate organization. Do not provide personal information or information about your organization, including its structure or networks, unless you are certain of a personâs authority to have the information. If possible, try to verify the callerâs identity directly with the company.
⢠If you receive a vishing call, document the phone number of the caller as well as the domain that the actor tried to send you to and relay this information to law enforcement.
⢠Limit the amount of personal information you post on social networking sites. The internet is a public resource; only post information you are comfortable with anyone seeing.
⢠Evaluate your settings: sites may change their options periodically, so review your security and privacy settings regularly to make sure that your choices are still appropriate.
Glen Akins (@bikerglen) joined Hackster Cafe to discuss building custom interfaces:
Our friend Glen has built a huge variety of human-computer interaction (HCI) devices ââ¬â letâs take a look at a few faves!
Right outta RSS.
The number of licensed amateur radio enthusiasts in the United States is not usually a statistic that I keep up with. Iâve been licensed for a long time and have read enough opinions about the inevitable death of the hobby due to our inability to attract youngsters that Iâve become immune to that panic. Strangely enough, you can do a little spelunking through 1930âs era QST magazines and read the exact same opinion. Surely by now we can admit that the notion of death due to a lack of youth is either faulty or the process is eternally slow.
But that doesnât mean amateur radio is safe from extinction.
Out of morbid curiosity I spent some time recently looking to see how we are faring these days and found that in terms of number of licensees in the US, we may have peaked. Growth had been swift and impressive in the aftermath of the code-less license but it seems that magic potion may have lost its efficacy.
I admit these kind of statistics are best viewed in the rear-view mirror from miles away as trends are much easier to spot that way. And the ten-year license term makes it tougher to detect small changes but the numbers do indicate that growth has stalled over the last few years when any detectable increase must be reflected using a decimal point if you want to put a positive spin on it.
More troubling than the slowing overall number is that more than half of all licensees in the US hold the entry-level Technician class license. It wasnât supposed to be this way. The plan was to provide an easy point of entry to the hobby where new licensees could get a taste for radio adventure and a thirst for a higher class license with expanded privileges.
Obtaining a license isnât difficult. Maintaining that license is even easier given that it can be renewed online for free. What it looks like may have happened is that a LOT of people entered the portal, took a look around and didnât care for what they saw. They may have lost interest but thereâs no reason to officially checkout so the number of Technicians remains swollen.
And I suspect this may be at the root of ARRLâs anxiety over a recent FCC proposal that could attach a fee to amateur licensing, including renewals. Fifty dollars for a ten-year license wonât reduce the number of active radio operators by even one. But that same fifty bucks might be sufficient friction to cause some dormant licensees to drop out of the pool altogether when it comes time to renew. A large downward shift in the number of of US hams is not the kind of publicity that will make the job of promoting and protecting amateur radio any easier.
If we were to see this Great Contraction in addition to continued commercial pressure for valuable segments of our spectrum along with falling interest in ham radio providing emergency communication services then the entire enterprise might become wobbly enough to speed its demise. Iâm not losing sleep over that prospect and neither should you, but the healthy environment required for amateur radio to thrive appears to be turning toxic at a quickening pace.
I am posting it a bit late, but this weekâs BSD Now has a bunch of how-tos and history; a good mix.
From Jenny List on Hackaday:
Ask Hackaday: What Tools Do You Really Need To Live On The Road
Into the pack goes an all-important packet of ginger biscuits, two laptops and their associated wiring, a hefty battery booster pack, and my folding headphones. Iâm set for writing, but why two laptops? For years Iâve worked with a powerful semi-paving-slab of a laptop in the office and a super-light Chromebook on the road, and when fate puts me in this position I find myself lumbered with both of them. Lesson learned: should you do this by choice rather than necessity make sure to pick a single laptop with both portability and power.
At the start of my nomadic existence I carried a soldering iron and a multimeter, screwdrivers and tweezers. I was set for whatever hardware the world would bring me, but somehow what I imagined never came. Another lesson learned: common tools are likely to already be wherever you might need them, in a hackerspace or at the bench of your technically inclined friends. Why carry what you can easily borrow, instead the art lies in selecting the uncommon tools that may not be to hand. And thereâs the rub, for you only discover what those are when you donât have them to hand. So far aside from the driver set Iâve found myself wanting a tape measure when I couldnât borrow one and missing my Vernier caliper, and while thereâs no way Iâll subject my Mitutoyo to my pack thereâs definitely a cheap instrument on my shopping list. Meanwhile Iâve hung on to the screwdriver set and left the soldering iron in my storage unit.
Before too long Iâll no doubt be settled again somewhere, but along the way I have parked up in a lot of field entrances on country roads, seen more motorway service stations and fast food drive-thru lanes than Iâd care to, learned a few things about life, about other people, about myself, and about which tools are indispensable but surprisingly uncommon. Which of you have had a similar experience, and what were the tools you found yourself needing on the road? Can we arrive at the truly indispensable kit of tools for the wandering hardware hacker, rather than the stuff we think weâll need? Our comments section is as always open.
Quanta magazine recently published a breathless article on indistinguishability obfuscation â calling it the ââcrown jewelâ of cryptographyâ â and saying that it had finally been achieved, based on a recently published paper. I want to add some caveats to the discussion.
Basically, obfuscation makes a computer program âunintelligibleâ by performing its functionality. Indistinguishability obfuscation is more relaxed. It just means that two different programs that perform the same functionality canât be distinguished from each other. A good definition is in this paper.
This is a pretty amazing theoretical result, and one to be excited about. We can now do obfuscation, and we can do it using assumptions that make real-world sense. The proofs are kind of ugly, but thatâs okay â itâs a start. What it means in theory is that we have a fundamental theoretical result that we can use to derive a whole bunch of other cryptographic primitives.
But â and this is a big one â this result is not even remotely close to being practical. Weâre talking multiple days to perform pretty simple calculations, using massively large blocks of computer code. And this is likely to remain true for a very long time. Unless researchers increase performance by many orders of magnitude, nothing in the real world will make use of this work anytime soon.
But but, consider fully homomorphic encryption. It, too, was initially theoretically interesting and completely impractical. And now, after decades of work, it seems to be almost just-barely maybe approaching practically useful. This could very well be on the same trajectory, and perhaps in twenty to thirty years we will be celebrating this early theoretical result as the beginning of a new theory of cryptography.
Our October Insights puzzle celebrated the work of the legendary mathematician John Horton Conway by inviting you to play with two math questions related to his work and to explore an open-ended game similar to his famous Game of Life. I was delighted with the enthusiastic response from readers.
Here are the puzzles and their solutions:
There is a mysterious 10-digit decimal number, abcdefghij. Each of the digits is different, and they have the following properties:
Whatâs the number?
The answer is: 3,816,547,290.
Several readers solved this puzzle. Nigix, Pawel Dabrowski, Douglas Felix, Alexandre Tussiot, Paolo Abiuso and Lazar Ilic gave detailed explanations of how it could be done using pen and paper.
To solve this, we need to remember some familiar elementary divisibility shortcuts, from which Iâve derived more specific rules for solving this puzzle.
Armed with these, letâs solve Conwayâs digital perfection puzzle.
7896543, 9876543, 1896543, 1896547, 9816543, 9816547, 1836547 and 3816547. Only the last one is divisible by 7.
There is an isosceles triangle that contains an angle of x degrees. The ratio of the two different lengths of its sides is y. It turns out that not one but two different triangles have the exact same values of x and y!
What are the values of x and y for these two isosceles triangles? Whatâs special about the triangles, and how do they relate to Conwayâs work?
We can find the angle x by applying the law of sines. It says that the ratios of the sides of a triangle divided by the sines of the corresponding angles are equal for all sides:
$latex \frac{a}{\sin A}$ = $latex \frac{b}{\sin B}$ = $latex \frac{c}{\sin C}$
or for a pair of angles and sides,
$latex \frac{a}{b}$ sin B = sin A
Let angle B measure x degrees in both triangles, as a base angle in the first triangle and as an apex angle in the other. This makes the measure of the other angle A = 180 â 2x degrees in the first triangle and 90 â x/2 in the second. We are told that the ratio of the sides (a/b) is equal in both triangles, and angle B is x degrees in both triangles, so the left side of the equation is the same in the two triangles. Therefore,
sin(180 â 2x) = sin(90 â x/2)
But sines of complementary angles are equal, so sin(180 â 2x) equals sin 2x. So we have 2x = 90 â x/2. Solving for x gives x = 36 degrees. So the first triangle has angles of 36, 36 and 108 degrees, and the second has angles of 36, 72 and 72 degrees.
The figure shows how these two types of triangles can mesh together. The large triangle has angles measuring 36, 72 and 72 degrees. It has been divided into two triangles by bisecting the base angle on the left side. The lower triangle is similar to the large triangle, while the upper one is the other type of triangle with angles measuring 36, 36 and 108 degrees.
If the length of the base of the lower triangle (at the right) is 1 unit and the base of the large triangle is P units, then the common ratio of the two different sides is P. This ratio in the large triangle is (P + 1)/P.
Equating the two, we get P = (P + 1)/P or P2 = P + 1. The only positive root of this equation is:
$latex \frac{1+\sqrt{5}}{2}$
which is the golden ratio!
These two triangles are known as Robinson triangles, and they play a huge part in the infinite aperiodic tessellations of the plane known as Penrose tilings. Much of the theory behind these tessellations was developed by Conway and Roger Penrose. Here is one such tiling made entirely of these triangles.
Each blue triangle is one type of Robinson triangle, and each yellow triangle is the other type. A pair of the blue triangles, joined along one of their longer sides forms a figure, which Conway called a kite, and a pair of the yellow triangles joined along one of their shorter sides forms a figure, which he called a dart. A kite and a dart fit together to form a rhombus with angles of 72 and 108 degrees. Kites and darts form the basic units of another kind of Penrose tiling for which Conway proved many interesting theorems about their uncountability, pentagonal symmetry and their other connections to the golden ratio.
Lazar Ilic pointed out the connection of the Robinson triangles to pentagons, and J S illustrated it. With angles of 36, 72 and 108 degrees, the trianglesâ connection to pentagons is natural and also allows the triangles to combine in many ways around a vertex.
Douglas Felix pointed out that the golden ratio also appears in the game of Conwayâs soldiers, âin the proof that the 5th row of the board can not be achieved by the player.â
Our final âno-player never-endingâ Conway-esque game, invented by reader Jona Raphael, is played as follows:
You have an infinite plane on which you place square tiles. One at a time, you add new tiles randomly such that each new tile shares at least one edge with a previously placed tile. The probability of a tile being placed in any given location is proportional to the number of edges of previously placed tiles that border that location. We define the âhairinessâ (H) or exteriority of any configuration as the number of exposed tile edges divided by the number of tiles.
(For examples and figures, please refer to the original puzzle column.)
I posed some questions to help readers start their own explorations.
1. A new tile may be placed next to a single edge (touching only one tile), at a corner (touching two), inside a âUâ (touching three) or inside a hole (touching all four). How does each placement affect the number of exposed edges in the new configuration?
Answer: Single edge: +2; corner (which could also be a âsandwichâ or âbridge,â as several readers pointed out): 0; âUâ: â2; hole: â4.
2. What are the minimum and maximum values of H, and what kinds of tile patterns do they correspond to? Can you come up with an approximate or exact formula for the maximum and minimum values of Has the number of tiles (n) increases?
Perfect squares: If n is a perfect square, the pattern that gives the minimum value of hairiness for its size is a filled square of side a, which has H = 4a/n or 4/a, or 4/$latex \frac{sqrt}$ where n is the number of tiles in the square.  The value is highest, H = 4, for n = 1. This value approaches 0 as the square gets very large.
Non-squares: If n is not a perfect square, then the minimum H is achieved âby constructing squares layer by layer,â in the words of Lazar Ilic. If a2 is the largest square lower than n, then:
Case 1: If (a2 + 1) ⤠n ⤠(a2 + a) then the minimum H is (4a + 2)/n. You initiate and fill an extra (a + 1)th row of tiles along either the vertical or the horizontal border of the square.
Case 2: If (a2 + a + 1) ⤠n ⤠(a2 + 2a) then the minimum H is (4a + 4)/n. You initiate and fill another single row along one of the two other perpendicular borders after completing the first (a + 1)th row.
Some readers expected that the minimum value of H would be reached when the configuration attained a disklike shape because a circle has the smallest perimeter for a given area. However, on a square matrix, a âcircleâ will always have many corners and projections that will tend to increase the perimeter beyond that of squares, whose borders are much smoother.
The maximum value for a given number of tiles n is given by a simple line of tiles stuck end to end, which has H = 2 + 2/n. This value approaches 2 for large n.
3. Whatâs the expected value of H(approximate or exact) for a given value of n?
This is a hard problem, as it requires enumerating all the tilings that can be generated by placing n tiles and then summing their edges weighted by their probability to calculate the expected H. In the table below, the first five expected values are exact, and the rest are approximate, based on the simulation by Philippe C-.
As the table shows, the minimum, maximum and expected values of H are the same for n = 1, 2 and 3. For very large n, the maximum approaches 2, and the minimum and expected values approach 0 at different rates.
| Number of Tiles | Minimum H | Maximum H | Expected H |
| 1 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| 3 | 2.67 | 2.67 | 2.67 |
| 4 | 2 | 2.5 | 2.42 |
| 5 | 2 | 2.4 | 2.25 |
| 10 | 1.4 | 2.2 | ~1.8 |
| 100 | 0.4 | 2.02 | ~0.7 |
| 500 | 0.18 | 2.004 | ~0.34 |
| â | Approaches 0 | Approaches 2 | Approaches 0 more slowly |
3. Find the smallest tiling that is âbalanced,â such that the addition of the next tile is as likely to increase the number of exposed edges as it is to decrease it. Can you find a symmetrical configuration that has this property?
For a tiling to be balanced, the expected number of edges added by placing a new tile must be 0. As we saw, edges are only added by singles (two additional edges with a weight of 1). Corners (and bridges) are neutral, while Uâs reduce edges by two (with a weight of 3) and holes reduce edges by four (with a weight of 4). So single edges need to be balanced with Uâs and/or holes using the following formulas:
Singles(s) and Uâs (u) only: s = 3u
Singles, holes (h) and Uâs:Â 2s = 16h + 6u
Singles and holes only: s = 8h
Here are the smallest tilings for each of the above cases:
4. Find the smallest tiling for which the expected value of Hremains the same after you add one tile. Whatâs the next-smallest tiling for which this property is true?
The smallest such configuration is a 2-by-2 square, which has four tiles and eight edges, for an H of 2. Adding one tile anywhere gives five tiles and 10 edges, maintaining an H of 2.
The next-smallest tiling, contributed by Lazar Ilic, is the one shown below of size 16 with 24 edges (H = 1.5), with probabilities 3/4 and 1/4 of moving to 26 or staying at 24 edges, respectively. This gives 17 tiles with an expectation of 25.5 edges, maintaining an expected H of 1.5.
Readers explored this game in interesting ways. Ty Rex even took a stab at extending the game to multiple dimensions. Thank you all for contributing. I hope you all had fun.
As for the name of the game, Iâve adopted âGame of Tile,â which was suggested by Glenn Gould as a tribute to Conway.
I would like to recommend Philippe C-âs excellent simulation, which gives you a visual sense of how the configuration grows. Itâs available at http://logicien.fr/conway/.
Because of the high probability of filling Uâs and holes, the overall shape becomes very blobby and not hairy at all as the number of tiles increases (Ty Rexâs suggested name for the game was âBlobâ). At my suggestion, Philippe C- incorporated the ability to assign custom weights to each number of edges, which allows more interesting and hairy configurations to emerge that you can play with in the simulation.
The Quanta Conway prize for this puzzle goes to Lazar Ilic. Congratulations!
See you for new Insights in February 2021. In the meantime, stay safe and have happy holidays.
A 21-year-old Irishman who pleaded guilty to charges of helping to steal millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies from victims has been sentenced to just under three years in prison. The defendant is part of an alleged conspiracy involving at least eight others in the United States who stand accused of theft via SIM swapping, a crime that involves convincing mobile phone company employees to transfer ownership of the targetâs phone number to a device the attackers control.
Conor Freeman of Dublin took part in the theft of more than two million dollars worth of cryptocurrency from different victims throughout 2018. Freeman was named as a member of a group of alleged SIM swappers called âThe Communityâ charged last year with wire fraud in connection with SIM swapping attacks that netted in excess of $2.4 million.
Among the eight others accused are three former wireless phone company employees who allegedly helped the gang hijack mobile numbers tied to their targets. Prosecutors say the men would identify people likely to have significant cryptocurrency holdings, then pay their phone company cohorts to transfer the victimâs mobile service to a new SIM card â the smart chip in each phone that ties a customerâs device to their number.
A fraudulent SIM swap allows the bad guys to intercept a targetâs incoming phone calls and text messages. This is dangerous because a great many sites and services still allow customers to reset their passwords simply by clicking on a link sent via SMS. From there, attackers can gain access to any accounts that allow password resets via SMS or automated calls, from email and social media profiles to virtual currency trading platforms.
Like other accused members of The Community, Freeman was an active member of OGUsers, a forum that caters to people selling access to hijacked social media and other online accounts. But unlike others in the group, Freeman used his real name (username: Conor), and disclosed his hometown and date of birth to others on the forum. At least twice in the past few years OGUsers was hacked, and its database of profiles and user messages posted online.
According to a report in The Irish Times, Freeman spent approximately â¬130,000, which he had converted into cash from the stolen cryptocurrency. Conor posted on OGUsers that he spent approximately $14,000 on a Rolex watch. The rest was handed over to the police in the form of an electronic wallet that held the equivalent of more than $2 million.
The Irish Times says the judge in the case insisted the three-year sentence was warranted in order to deter the defendant and to prevent others from following in his footsteps. The judge said stealing money of this order is serious because no one can know the effect it will have on the victim, noting that one victimâs life savings were taken and the proceeds of the sale of his house were stolen.
One way to protect your accounts against SIM swappers is to remove your phone number as a primary or secondary authentication mechanism wherever possible. Many online services require you to provide a phone number upon registering an account, but in many cases that number can be removed from your profile afterwards.
Itâs also important for people to use something other than text messages for two-factor authentication on their email accounts when stronger authentication options are available. Consider instead using a mobile app like Authy, Duo, or Google Authenticator to generate the one-time code. Or better yet, a physical security key if thatâs an option.
I always wanted to get to Arecibo, the magnificent 305-meter telescope that has for so long been a locus for radio astronomy research, but I was never able to make it to Puerto Rico. Now Iâve run out of time. The National Science Foundation doesnât make these decisions lightly but multiple engineering companies have delivered assessments that point to catastrophic failure of the telescope structure as a real possibility. Too dangerous to repair, and faced with stability issues even if it could be repaired, the Arecibo Observatory will be decommissioned.
The breakdown in the vast structure has been ongoing, bits and pieces of news that added further dismay to an already dismal 2020. A support cable detached in August, resulting in an evaluation from the University of Central Florida, which manages the site. Replacement auxiliary cables were then on the way, temporary cables available, but on November 6 another main cable broke. The stresses on the second cable evidently told the story, making it clear that to proceed with repair would be to push against acceptable standards of safety.
Ralph Gaume, director of NSFâs Division of Astronomical Sciences, sums up the situation:
âLeadership at Arecibo Observatory and UCF did a commendable job addressing this situation, acting quickly and pursuing every possible option to save this incredible instrument. Until these assessments came in, our question was not if the observatory should be repaired but how. But in the end, a preponderance of data showed that we simply could not do this safely. And that is a line we cannot cross.â
Image: Arecibo Observatoryâs 305-meter telescope in November of 2020. Credit: University of Central Florida.
Itâs going to take some time for me to get my head around losing Arecibo, which has been since the early 1960s a part of my mental landscape when contemplating our civilization and its context in the cosmos. I had gotten to thinking in terms of âArecibosâ of transmitting power, meaning that a dish like Arecibo could pick up an installation of comparable power over a span of 1,000 light years, a volume in which there are more than 10,000,000 stars. Ideas like that fueled my interest in SETI, which grew into a general passion for exoplanet research.
Remember, although we sometimes hear 51 Pegasi b referred to as the first exoplanet discovered, the honor actually belongs to the planets at the pulsar PSR B1257+12, which were found three years earlier in 1992 by Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail using Arecibo data (51 Pegasi b was the first exoplanet found around a main sequence star, a valid distinction since pulsar planets are an unusual extreme as we contemplate the conditions extant in planetary systems). Speaking of pulsars, the first binary one was uncovered in Arecibo data in 1974 by Russell Hulse and Joseph H. Taylor, Jr., a find that earned the duo the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1993.
Arecibo has produced radar maps of Venus and Mercury and has charted near-Earth asteroids. As far back as 1965, it uncovered the actual rotation rate of Mercury (59 days as opposed to the previously believed 88). It analyzed the pulsar from the Crab Nebula supernova remnant in 1968 and performed the first radar ranging to an Earth-crossing asteroid (1862 Apollo) in 1980. Its planetary radar found evidence for hydrocarbon lakes on Titan and the observatory was used to study frequencies in the 1,000 MHz to 3,000 MHz range as part of the SETI effort.
Indeed, the list of accomplishments is far too long to list here, so Iâll direct you to this summary page. I do want to mention in the SETI context (although it was a matter of transmitting rather than listening) the 1974 message sent toward the globular cluster M13 by Frank Drake, primarily performed, Iâm told, as a way of demonstrating what newly installed equipment could do. Even so, that transmission is an oft-cited marker in our thinking about our own place in the universe and the possibility of other technological civilizations we might encounter.
Invariably I think of Jill Tarter in terms of SETI, in this context because of her involvement in Project Phoenix, which moved to Arecibo in 1998 after stints at Parkes (Australia) and Green Bank (WV). As soon as I learned of Areciboâs decommissioning, I wrote to ask for a comment. My own reflections on Arecibo hardly match the poetic depth of Dr. Tarterâs response:
Iâve been going to Arecibo since 1978. Over the decades, weâve built a lot of Arecibo-specific hardware, written a lot of software, and bent the telescope control system into modes it was never designed for.
Arecibo was an impressive feat of engineering, a scientific workhorse, and it never lost that aura of being slightly exotic, no matter how many times I visited there; the constant croaking of the coquis [a frog common to Puerto Rico], the perfumes of the tropical forest, the local Ron del Barrelito [a rum said to be the best on the island], the Gregorian dome with its unmistakable compressor cadence, the jogging track underneath the dish ringed with small orchids, Orion rising over the treetops as seen from the balcony of the VSQ [Visiting Scientists Quarters], before heading off to my midnight shift of Project Phoenix observations, and the absolutely best view on the island from atop the platform.
But most of all I remember the staff and the resident scientists who were very close knit, offered us superb technical support, and threw wonderful parties with lots of dancing. It is very sad to witness the passing of this scientific Queen. She withstood powerful hurricanes, but age appears to have gotten the upper hand.
Areciboâs demise also led me to touch base with Greg Matloff (New York City College of Technology (NYCCT)), whose work on interstellar propulsion was what originally drew me to the field (his Starflight Handbook, written with Eugene Mallove, was a frequently consulted text and provoked the research that led to my Centauri Dreams book in 2004). We had discussed Areciboâs role in planetary protection in many conversations. Said Matloff:
âThe loss of Arecibo is heartbreaking. This observatory has contributed so much to the study of Earthâs upper atmosphere, Solar System and deep sky objects, and SETI. But its greatest significance today is its service as planetary radar. Much of what we know about Near Earth Asteroids that might someday impact the Earth is due to the imaging capabilities of this instrument. It is my hope that an upgraded Arecibo can be constructed at the same site to continue this work of Earth Defense.â
Thatâs a hope many of us share, and we will see what comes of it. I do notice in the National Science Foundationâs materials on the decommissioning that NSF intends âto restore operations at assets such as the Arecibo Observatory LIDAR facility â a valuable geospace research tool â as well as at the visitor center and offsite Culebra facility, which analyzes cloud cover and precipitation data. NSF would also seek to explore possibilities for expanding the educational capacities of the learning center.â
What may emerge following telescope decommissioning is worth pondering.
If youâre into 3D printing, no doubt you are familiar with some of the ways it is being used in sports. Some of my own products (above) have included a 3D printed bicycle frame, smart bicycle helmet and surf fins, while in the media products have included shoes, golf clubs and shin pads.
However, as a researcher, I was interested to know how this translates into academic research. How many research studies have been looking at 3D printing for sports products? How much improvement does a 3D printed product offer over a conventional one? Which sports are adopting 3D printing? Working with my brother, Dr Andrew Novak, we hypothesized that given the amount of coverage in 3D printing media, there should be quite a large amount of research supporting the developments of iconic 3D printed sports products, as well as novel developments that havenât even made it into the media yet. The results â published in a paper titled âIs additive manufacturing improving performance in Sports? A systematic reviewâ â were surprising (preprint version freely available).
Up until May 2019, we found only 26 academic studies that provided any empirical evidence related to 3D printing for sports products. The graph above shows which sports, and how many articles have been published. The first of these appeared in 2010. Running/walking was the most popular sport with 10 articles (38%), followed by cycling with 4 articles (15%) and badminton with 3 articles (12%). All other sports â baseball, climbing, cricket, football (soccer), golf, hurling, in-line skating, rowing and surfing â had only been assessed in single studies. This means that a lot of research into 3D printing of sports products are just one-off projects, and indicates that there may be very little funding/interest to continue building larger projects.
It also suggests that any research being done to support mainstream commercial applications of 3D printing, for example for brands like Adidas and Specialized, is protected by intellectual property (IP) and not being published.
10 articles (38%) observed improvements in performance of products developed via 3D printing compared to conventionally manufactured products, 8 articles (31%) found a similar performance, and 5 articles (19%) found a lower performance.
From a technical perspective, powder bed fusion technologies were the most utilized with 50% of articles using either selective laser sintering (SLS) or selective laser melting (SLM), although 52% of articles did not name the 3D printer used and 36% did not name any software used to design or optimize products. 3D scanning technology was also utilized in 11 articles (42%).
So, is 3D printing in sport a hit or hype? Based on this research it is clear that within academia, 3D printing is still in the very early phases of consideration, and seems to be significantly behind industry. While you may be able to go and buy some 3D printed running shoes or insoles, or cycle on a 3D printed saddle, you wonât find any objective data in journal articles on these products or much research to suggest that 3D printed products are any better than conventionally manufacture products.
â Posted by James Novak
The Bailong Elevator in China, continued wildfires in California, hats on display in Russia, dancers in Australia and Italy, damaging storms in Honduras and the Philippines, a surge in COVID-19 cases in the U.S., Christmas preparations during a pandemic, a rocket launch to the International Space Station, and much more
![[scrolling through a giant spreadsheet of transcribed data] 'Wow, a surprising number of users grew up at 420 69th St.' 'Yeah, must be a high-rise or something.'](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/viral_quiz_identity_theft.png "[scrolling through a giant spreadsheet of transcribed data] 'Wow, a surprising number of users grew up at 420 69th St.' 'Yeah, must be a high-rise or something.'")
After launching one of its rockets to orbit on Thursday, small satellite launcher Rocket Lab successfully brought the vehicle back to Earth and landed it gently in the ocean underneath a series of parachutes. The maneuver was part of an intricate dress rehearsal, meant to practice nearly all of the steps Rocket Lab will take to recover and reuse its rockets in the future.
Rocket Labâs primary rocket is the Electron, aimed at launching batches of small satellites into low Earth orbit. For all of the companyâs 15 launches up until now, the Electron has been expendable, with an entirely new rocket used for each new mission. But in 2019, Rocket Lab announced its plans to try to save the majority of the Electron rocket following future...
If memory serves, there were those who read this comic the first time it was published and felt that Missy should be offended that I suggested that she thinks sheâs always right. She was not offended, because she realizes that, for the most part, everyone always thinks theyâre right about everything.
People donât hold on to opinions they know are wrong. They often hold on to opinions they know are unpopular, but they assume they are right, and the majority are wrong.
On the rare occasions that people realize theyâre wrong, they rethink things, change their minds, and instantly become convinced that they are right again.
The fact that we both find that kind of logical paradox amusing, or at least that sheâs willing to listen as I explain them and find them funny, is part of why we make a good couple.
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