Fortune reports that Crowdstrike "is enjoying a moment of strange cultural cachet at the annual Black Hat security conference, as throngs of visitors flock to its booth to snap selfies and load up on branded company shirts and other swag." (Some attendees "collectively shrugged at the idea that Crowdstrike could be blamed for a problem with a routine update that could happen to any of the security companies deeply intertwined with Microsoft Windows.") Others pointed out that Microsoft should take their fair share of the blame for the outage, which many say was caused by the design of Windows in its core architecture that leads to malware, spyware and driver instability. "Microsoft should not be giving any third party that level of access," said Eric O'Neill, a cybersecurity expert, attorney and former FBI operative. "Microsoft will complain, well, it's just the way that the technology works, or licensing works, but that's bullshit, because this same problem didn't affect Linux or Mac. And Crowdstrike caught it super-early." Their article notes that Crowdstrike is one of this year's top sponsors of the conference. Despite its recent missteps, Crowdstrike had one of the biggest booths, notes TechCrunch, and "As soon as the doors opened, dozens of attendees started lining up." They were not all there to ask tough questions, but to pick up T-shirts and action figures made by the company to represent some of the nation-state and cybercriminal grups it tracks, such as Scattered Spider, an extortion racket allegedly behind last year's MGM Resorts and Okta cyberattacks; and Aquatic Panda, a China-linked espionage group. "We're here to give you free stuff," a CrowdStrike employee told people gathered around a big screen where employees would later give demos. A conference attendee looked visibly surprised. "I just thought it would be dead, honestly. I thought it would be slower over there. But obviously, people are still fans, right?" For CrowdStrike at Black Hat, there was an element of business as usual, despite its global IT outage that caused widespread disruption and delays for days — and even weeks for some customers. The conference came at the same time as CrowdStrike released its root cause analysis that explained what happened the day of the outage. In short, CrowdStrike conceded that it messed up but said it's taken steps to prevent the same incident happening again. And some cybersecurity professionals attending Black Hat appeared ready to give the company a second chance.... TechCrunch spoke to more than a dozen conference attendees who visited the CrowdStrike booth. More than half of attendees we spoke with expressed a positive view of the company following the outage. "Does it lower my opinion of their ability to be a leading-edge security company? I don't think so," said a U.S. government employee, who said he uses CrowdStrike every day. Although TechCrunch does note that one engineer told his parent company they might consider Crowdstrike competitor Sophos...

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Observer: Thousands of scientists have protested to the US Congress over the "unprecedented and indefensible" decision by Nasa to cancel its Viper lunar rover mission. In an open letter to Capitol Hill, they have denounced the move, which was revealed last month, and heavily criticised the space agency over a decision that has shocked astronomers and astrophysicists across the globe. The car-sized rover has already been constructed at a cost of $450 million and was scheduled to be sent to the moon next year, when it would have used a one-metre drill to prospect for ice below the lunar surface in soil at the moon's south pole. Ice is considered to be vital to plans to build a lunar colony, not just to supply astronauts with water but also to provide them with hydrogen and oxygen that could be used as fuels... "Quite frankly, the agency's decision beggars belief," said Prof Clive Neal, a lunar scientist at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana. "Viper is a fundamental mission on so many fronts and its cancellation basically undermines Nasa's entire lunar exploration programme for the next decade. It is as straightforward as that. Cancelling Viper makes no sense whatsoever." This view was backed by Ben Fernando of Johns Hopkins University, who was one of the organisers of the open letter to Congress. "A team of 500 people dedicated years of their careers to construct Viper and now it has been cancelled for no good reason whatsoever," he told the Observer last week. "Fortunately I think Congress is taking this issue very seriously and they have the power to tell Nasa that it has to go ahead with the project. Hopefully they will intervene." "When Nasa announced its decision to abandon Viper, the space agency said it planned to disassemble and reuse its components for other moon missions — unless other space companies or agencies offered to take over the project. More than a dozen groups have since expressed an interest in taking over Viper, a Nasa spokesperson told the Observer last week."

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"A lawsuit has accused a Florida data broker of carelessly failing to secure billions of records of people's private information," reports the Register, "which was subsequently stolen from the biz and sold on an online criminal marketplace." California resident Christopher Hofmann filed the potential class-action complaint against Jerico Pictures, doing business as National Public Data, a Coral Springs-based firm that provides APIs so that companies can perform things like background checks on people and look up folks' criminal records. As such National Public Data holds a lot of highly personal information, which ended up being stolen in a cyberattack. According to the suit, filed in a southern Florida federal district court, Hofmann is one of the individuals whose sensitive information was pilfered by crooks and then put up for sale for $3.5 million on an underworld forum in April. If the thieves are to be believed, the database included 2.9 billion records on all US, Canadian, and British citizens, and included their full names, addresses, and address history going back at least three decades, social security numbers, and the names of their parents, siblings, and relatives, some of whom have been dead for nearly 20 years. Hofmann's lawsuit says he 'believes that his personally identifiable information was scraped from non-public sources," according to the article — which adds that Hofmann "claims he never provided this sensitive info to National Public Data... "The Florida firm stands accused of negligently storing the database in a way that was accessible to the thieves, without encrypting its contents nor redacting any of the individuals' sensitive information." Hofmann, on behalf of potentially millions of other plaintiffs, has asked the court to require National Public Data to destroy all personal information belonging to the class-action members and use encryption, among other data protection methods in the future... Additionally, it seeks unspecified monetary relief for the data theft victims, including "actual, statutory, nominal, and consequential damages."

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CNN reports: Former President Donald Trump's campaign said Saturday in a statement that it had been hacked. Politico reported earlier Saturday that it had received emails from an anonymous account with documents from inside Trump's campaign operation. "These documents were obtained illegally from foreign sources hostile to the United States, intended to interfere with the 2024 election and sow chaos throughout our Democratic process," Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement to CNN. Cheung pointed to a recent report published by Microsoft that said Iranian operatives had ramped up their attempts to influence and monitor the US presidential election by creating fake news outlets targeting liberal and conservative voters and by trying to hack an unnamed presidential campaign... Still, it's not clear whether Iran was responsible for the hack. CNN has reached out to the Iranian mission to the United Nations for comment... Politico reported it had received emails that contained internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official and a [271-page] research dossier the campaign had put together on Trump's running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The dossier included what the Trump campaign identified as Vance's potential vulnerabilities... In 2016, days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks published nearly 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee server.

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Slashdot reader sciencehabit shared this report from Science magazine: One of the classic tropes of science fiction is terraforming Mars: warming up our cold neighbor so it could support human civilization. The idea might not be so far-fetched, research published today in Science Advances suggests... Samaneh Ansari [a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University and lead author on the new study] and her colleagues wanted to test the heat-trapping abilities of a substance Mars holds in abundance: dust. Martian dust is rich in iron and aluminum, which give it its characteristic red hue. But its microscopic size and roughly spherical shape are not conducive to absorbing radiation or reflecting it back to the surface. So the researchers brainstormed a different particle: using the iron and aluminum in the dust to manufacture 9-micrometer-long rods, about twice as big as a speck of martian dust and smaller than commercially available glitter. Ansari designed a simulation to test how these theoretical particles would interact with light. She found "unexpectedly huge effects" in how they absorbed infrared radiation from the surface and how they scattered that radiation back down to Mars — key factors that determine whether an aerosol particle creates a greenhouse effect. Collaborators at the University of Chicago and the University of Central Florida then fed the particles into computer models of Mars's climate. They examined the effect of annually injecting 2 million tons of the rods 10 to 100 meters above the surface, where they would be lofted to higher altitudes by turbulent winds and settle out of the atmosphere 10 times more slowly than natural Mars dust. Mars could warm by about 10 degreesC within a matter of months, the team found, despite requiring 5000 times less material than other proposed greenhouse gas schemes... Still, "Increasing the temperature of the planet is just one of the things that we would need to do in order to live on Mars without any assistance," says Juan Alday, a postdoctoral planetary science researcher at the Open University not involved with the work. For one, the amount of oxygen in Mars's atmosphere is only 0.1%, compared with 21% on Earth. The pressure on Mars is also 150 times lower than on Earth, which would cause human blood to boil. And Mars has no ozone layer, which means there is no protection from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. What's more, even once warmed, martian soils may still be too salty or toxic to grow crops. In other words, McInnes says, upping the temperature "isn't some kind of magic switch" that would make Mars habitable. That isn't stopping Ansari and her colleagues from investigating the possibilities.

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"Samsung's latest solid-state battery technology will power up premium EVs first, giving them up to 621 miles of range," writes PC Magazine: The new batteries — which promise to improve vehicle range, decrease charging times, and eliminate risk of battery fires — could go into mass production as soon as 2027. Multiple automakers have been reportedly testing samples. Samsung did not list any by name but it's worked with Hyundai, Stellantis, and General Motors, among others. "We supplied samples to customers from the end of last year to the beginning of this year and are receiving positive feedback," Samsung SDI VP Koh Joo-young said at SNE Battery Day 2024 in Seoul, according to Korean outlet The Elec and translated by Google. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the batteries won't be cheap. They will initially go in "super premium EVs" and will offer 900 to 1,000 kilometers (559-621 miles) of range and improved safety... Samsung's presentation also reiterated previously announced plans to create batteries that can charge in nine minutes and last 20 years by 2029. More details from Notebookcheck: According to Samsung SDI's VP, automakers are interested in its solid-state battery packs because they are smaller, lighter, and much safer than what's in current electric cars. Apparently, they are also rather expensive to produce, since it warns that they will first go into the "super premium" EV segment. Those Samsung defines as luxury electric cars that can cover more than 600 miles on a charge. Samsung's oxide solid-state battery technology is rated for an energy density of about 500 Wh/kg, which is about double the density of mainstream EV batteries. Those have capacities that already allow more than 300 miles on a charge, so 600 miles of range in a similar footprint is not out of the question, but the issue is production costs. Thanks to Slashdot reader npetrov for sharing the news.

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FBI agent Rick Smith remembered seeing that Austrian-born Silicon Valley entrepreneur one year earlier — walking into San Francisco's Soviet Consulate in the early 1980s. Their chance reunion at a bar "would sow the seeds for a major counterintelligence campaign," writes a national security journalist in Politico, describing the collaboration as "an FBI-led operation that sold the Soviet Bloc millions in secretly sabotaged U.S. hi-tech." The Austrian was already selling American tech goods to European countries, and "By the early 1980s, the FBI knew the Soviet Union was desperate for cutting-edge American technology, like the U.S.-produced microchips then revolutionizing a vast array of digital devices, including military systems..." Moscow's spies worked assiduously to steal such dual use tech or purchase it covertly. The Soviet Union's ballistic missile programs, air defense systems, electronic spying platforms, and even space shuttles, depended on it.... But such tech-focused sanctions-evasion schemes by America's foes offer opportunities for U.S. intelligence, too — including the opportunity to launch ultra-secret sabotage campaigns to alter sensitive technologies before they reach their final destination... Working under the FBI's direction, the Austrian agreed to pose as a crook, a man willing to sell prohibited technology to the communist Eastern Bloc... [T]he FBI and the Austrian would seed faulty tech to Moscow and its allies; drain the Soviet Bloc's coffers; expose its intelligence officers and secret American conspirators; and reveal to American counterspies exactly what tech the Soviets were after... [T]he Soviet Bloc would unknowingly purchase millions of dollars' worth of sabotaged U.S. goods. Communist spies, ignorant that they were being played, would be feted with a literal parade in a Warsaw Pact capital for their success in purchasing this forbidden technology from the West... The Austrian's connections now presented a major opportunity. The Bulgarians, and their East German and Russia allies, were going to get that forbidden tech. But not before the FBI tampered with it first... Some of the tech was subtly altered before the Bulgarians could get their hands on it. Some was rendered completely unusable. Some of it was shipped unadulterated to keep the operation humming — and allay any suspicions from the Eastern Bloc about what might be going on. And some of it never made its way to the Bulgarians at all. In one case, the bureau intercepted a $400,000 order of computer hardware from the San Jose-based firm Proquip and shipped out 6,000 pounds of sandbags instead.... Some suffered what appeared to be "accidental" wear-and-tear during the long journey to the Eastern Bloc, recalled Ed Appel [a former senior FBI official]. Other times, the FBI would tamper with the electronics so they would experience "chance" voltage overloads once Soviet Bloc operatives plugged them in. The sabotage could also be more subtle, designed to degrade machine parts or microchips over time, or to render hi-tech tools that required intense precision slightly, if imperceptibly, inaccurate. The article concludes that "While the Soviet Union might have imploded over three decades ago... Russia's intelligence services are still scouring the globe for prohibited U.S. tech, particularly since Moscow's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine... "Russia has reportedly even covertly imported household items like refrigerators and washing machines to rip out the microchips within them for use in military equipment."

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"CrowdStrike has continued doing what gave it such an expansive footprint in the first place," writes CSO Online — "detecting cyber threats and protecting its clients from them." They interviewed Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike's SVP of counter adversary operations, whose team produced their 2024 Threat Hunting Report (released this week at the Black Hat conference). Of seven case studies presented in the report, the most daring is that of a group CrowdStrike calls Famous Chollima, an alleged DPRK-nexus group. Starting with a single incident in April 2024, CrowdStrike discovered that a group of North Koreans, posing as American workers, had been hired for multiple remote IT worker jobs in early 2023 at more than thirty US-based companies, including aerospace, defense, retail, and technology organizations. CrowdStrike's threat hunters discovered that after obtaining employee-level access to victim networks, the phony workers performed at minimal enough levels to keep their jobs while attempting to exfiltrate data using Git, SharePoint, and OneDrive and installing remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools RustDesk, AnyDesk, TinyPilot, VS Code Dev Tunnels, and Google Chrome Remote Desktop. The workers leveraged these RMM tools with company network credentials, enabling numerous IP addresses to connect to victims' systems. CrowdStrike's OverWatch hunters, a team of experts conducting analysis, hunted for RMM tooling combined with suspicious connections surfaced by the company's Falcon Identity Protection module to find more personas and additional indicators of compromise. CrowdStrike ultimately found that over 100 companies, most US-based technology entities, had hired Famous Chollima workers. The OverWatch team contacted victimized companies to inform them about potential insider threats and quickly corroborated its findings. Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the news.

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Google's loss in an antitrust trial is just the beginning. According to Yahoo Finance's senior legal reporter, Google now also has to defend itself "against another perilous antitrust challenge that could inflict more damage." Starting in September, the tech giant will square off against federal prosecutors and a group of states claiming that Google abused its dominance of search advertising technology that is used to sell, buy, and broker advertising space online... Juggling simultaneous defenses "will definitely create a strain on its resources, productivity, and most importantly, attention at the most senior levels," said David Olson, associate professor at Boston College Law School.... The two cases targeting Google have the potential to inflict major damage to an empire amassed over the last two decades. The second case that begins next month began with a lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia by the Justice Department and eight states in December 2020... Prosecutors allege that since at least 2015 Google has thwarted meaningful competition and deterred innovation through its ownership of the entities and software that power the online advertising technology market. Google owns most of the technology to buy, sell, and serve advertisements online... Google's share of the US and global advertising markets — when measured either by revenue or impressions — exceeded 90% for "many years," according to the complaint. The government prosecutors accused Google of siphoning off $0.35 of each advertising dollar that flowed through its ad tech tools. Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for sharing the article.

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Slashdot reader echo123 shared this report from Ars Technica: The NASA program to develop a new upper stage for the Space Launch System rocket is seven years behind schedule and significantly over budget, a new report from the space agency's inspector general finds. However, beyond these headline numbers, there is also some eye-opening information about the project's prime contractor, Boeing, and its poor quality control practices... "We found an array of issues that could hinder SLS Block 1B's readiness for Artemis IV including Boeing's inadequate quality management system, escalating costs and schedules, and inadequate visibility into the Block 1B's projected costs," states the report, signed by NASA's deputy inspector general, George A. Scott. There are some surprising details in the report about Boeing's quality control practices at the Michoud Assembly Facility in southern Louisiana, where the Exploration Upper Stage is being manufactured. Federal observers have issued a striking number of "Corrective Action Requests" to Boeing. "According to Safety and Mission Assurance officials at NASA and DCMA officials at Michoud, Boeing's quality control issues are largely caused by its workforce having insufficient aerospace production experience," the report states. "The lack of a trained and qualified workforce increases the risk that the contractor will continue to manufacture parts and components that do not adhere to NASA requirements and industry standards." This lack of a qualified workforce has resulted in significant program delays and increased costs. According to the new report, "unsatisfactory" welding operations resulted in propellant tanks that did not meet specifications, which directly led to a seven-month delay in the program.

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A new article in ScienceAlert describes new research into the dangers of "heavily processed sources of digital nourishment" for generative AI: A new study by researchers from Rice University and Stanford University in the US offers evidence that when AI engines are trained on synthetic, machine-made input rather than text and images made by actual people, the quality of their output starts to suffer. The researchers are calling this effect Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD). The AI effectively consumes itself, which means there are parallels for mad cow disease — a neurological disorder in cows that are fed the infected remains of other cattle. Without fresh, real-world data, content produced by AI declines in its level of quality, in its level of diversity, or both, the study shows. It's a warning about a future of AI slop from these models. "Our theoretical and empirical analyses have enabled us to extrapolate what might happen as generative models become ubiquitous and train future models in self-consuming loops," says computer engineer Richard Baraniuk, from Rice University. "Some ramifications are clear: without enough fresh real data, future generative models are doomed to MADness." The article notes that "faces began to look more and more like each other when fresh, human-generated training data wasn't involved. In tests using handwritten numbers, the numbers gradually became indecipherable. "Where real data was used but in a fixed way without new data being added, the quality of the output was still degraded, merely taking a little longer to break down. It appears that freshness is crucial." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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"The artificial turf industry has had a great deal of success convincing millions of people that its short-lived, nonrecyclable, fossil-fuel-derived product is somehow good for the environment," complains the head of Los Angeles' chapter of the advocacy nonprofit, the Climate Reality Project. In an opinion piece published in the Los Angeles Times, he argues that "In fact, it's clear that artificial turf is bad for our ecosystems as well as our health." The piece's title? "What's more environmentally irresponsible than a thirsty L.A. lawn? A fake plastic one." Artificial turf exacerbates the effects of climate change. On a 90-degree Los Angeles day, the temperature of artificial turf can reach 150 degrees or higher — hot enough to burn skin. And artificial turf is disproportionately installed to replace private lawns and public landscaping in economically disadvantaged communities that already face the greatest consequences of the urban heat-island effect, in which hard surfaces raise local temperatures. Artificial turf consists of single-use plastics made from crude oil or methane. The extraction, refining and processing of these petrochemicals, along with the transporting and eventual removal of artificial turf, come with a significant carbon footprint. Artificial turf is full of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, known as "forever chemicals" because they accumulate in the environment and living tissue. The Synthetic Turf Council has noted manufacturers' efforts to ensure that their products "contain no intentionally-added PFAS constituents." So what? Tobacco companies don't intentionally add carcinogens to cigarettes; they're built into the product. PFAS have been linked to serious health effects, and while artificial turf is by no means the only source of them, it is one we can avoid. Because artificial turf is a complex product made of multiple types of plastic, it will never be recycled. After its relatively short lifespan of about eight to 15 years, artificial turf ends up in indefinite storage, landfills and incinerators, creating a whole host of additional pollution problems... Remarkably, artificial turf doesn't even save water compared with grass... [A]rtificial turf must be regularly cleaned with water, and in warm climates such as Los Angeles', artificial fields get so hot that schools must water them down before children play on them. Astroturf also doesn't absorb rainwater, the piece poitns out. In fact, studies show the maintenance costs of artificial turf often exceed those of natural grass. Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article,

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The Australian sea lions glide and dart through underwater tunnels, over seagrass beds and rocky reefs, searching for a meal and dancing with dolphins around a giant bait ball of fish -- all the action captured by a camera stuck on their back. "I can watch this stuff for hours," says Prof Simon Goldsworthy. "It's like the best slow TV ever. You just don't know what you're going to see next." The Australian sea lion is in trouble. They were hunted until the early 20th century. Commercial fishing nets and pots have proved to be a more modern threat. Numbers have crashed by 60% in the past 40 years, leaving only about 10,000 of them mostly spread thinly across 80 breeding sites along Australia's south and west coastline. Goldsworthy's "slow TV" is the result of new efforts to employ the sea lions to map the ocean floor -- and their own habitats -- by sticking cameras with satellite tracking to their backs. So far, eight females from two seal colonies have filmed almost 90 hours of footage across more than 500km, helping scientists to map 5,000 sq km of habitat. The sea lions have mapped rocky reefs and seagrass meadows along the continental shelf, and shown humans the places that are important to them. With that information, conservationists will have much clearer ideas on how to protect the country's only endemic seal. A study outlining the sea lions' camera work has been published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

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Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: The upper stage from a Chinese rocket that launched a batch of Internet satellites Tuesday has broken apart in space, creating a debris field of at least 700 objects in one of the most heavily-trafficked zones in low-Earth orbit. US Space Command, which tracks objects in orbit with a network of radars and optical sensors, confirmed the rocket breakup Thursday. Space Command initially said the event created more than 300 pieces of trackable debris. The military's ground-based radars are capable of tracking objects larger than 10 centimeters (4 inches). Later Thursday, LeoLabs, a commercial space situational awareness company, said its radars detected at least 700 objects attributed to the Chinese rocket. The number of debris fragments could rise to more than 900, LeoLabs said. The culprit is the second stage of China's Long March 6A rocket, which lifted off Tuesday with the first batch of 18 satellites for a planned Chinese megaconstellation that could eventually number thousands of spacecraft. The Long March 6A's second stage apparently disintegrated after placing its payload of 18 satellites into a polar orbit. Space Command said in a statement it has "observed no immediate threats" and "continues to conduct routine conjunction assessments to support the safety and sustainability of the space domain." According to LeoLabs, radar data indicated the rocket broke apart at an altitude of 503 miles (810 kilometers) at approximately 4:10 pm EDT (20:10 UTC) on Tuesday, around 13-and-a-half hours after it lifted off from northern China. At this altitude, it will take decades or centuries for the wispy effect of aerodynamic drag to pull the debris back into the atmosphere. As the objects drift lower, their orbits will cross paths with SpaceX's Starlink Internet satellites, the International Space Station and other crew spacecraft, and thousands more pieces of orbital debris, putting commercial and government satellites at risk of collision.

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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is exploring the possibility of directly converting radiation from nuclear reactors into electricity using radiovoltaics, a technology that could potentially revolutionize nuclear power generation by moving beyond traditional steam turbine methods. The agency is requesting information and suggestions on this topic in an RFI released on August 1st. Nuclear News reports: There's got to be a better way": Methods to convert the energy of nuclear fission reactions and the decay of radioisotopes into electricity have not evolved since the invention of radioisotope power systems and fission reactors over 70 years ago and remain unoptimized," the RFI says. They rely on thermal heat transfer, and "in each step of this indirect conversion method neutrons, heat, and energy are lost to the shielding material, working fluid, and other system materials." Advanced reactor designs that use alternative coolants, including helium, sodium, and salts, would still use what DARPA calls "heritage nuclear power conversion technology" with water and steam as the working fluids, as would the fusion power plants being planned today. Why now? Tabitha Dodson, the program manager for DARPA DSO, which is launching the RFI, told Nuclear News that "two big things" are driving the interest. "One is the extreme surge of investment in small and advanced nuclear technologies, such as in fusion and space reactors, which do not have a concurrent pairing of advanced power generation methods that doesn't involve liquid-based heat transfer," she said. "Next, there has been an order of magnitude improvement in radiation tolerance and efficiency for voltaics in recent years with encouraging performance that indicates radiovoltaics could scale up as an array usable in nuclear reactors." [...] What is the ask?: The RFI asks: "Is it possible to achieve [a] direct energy conversion nuclear power system, ranging in power from 10s of watts electric (We) to 100s of kWe?" DARPA wants information "on the potential to improve specific power greater than 1 We/kg conversion from watts-thermal per radiation emission product," and information on the potential to improve damage tolerance of the voltaic to nuclear radiation to reach an operating lifetime comparable to the life of its nuclear source, on the scale of decades. "We will learn what our boundary conditions are when respondents tell us what technologies in the field of voltaics are possible, and we'll use that to see if there is sufficient scientific rationale make a case to present for further DARPA investment," Dodson said. "I also hope people are going to start thinking about nuclear systems that use electromagnetic versus thermal-kinetic methods to harvest nuclear energetic reactions."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Inertial confinement fusion is one method for generating energy through nuclear fusion, albeit one plagued by all manner of scientific challenges (although progress is being made). Researchers at LeHigh University are attempting to overcome one specific bugbear with this approach by conducting experiments with mayonnaise placed in a rotating figure-eight contraption. They described their most recent findings in a new paper published in the journal Physical Review E with an eye toward increasing energy yields from fusion. The work builds on prior research in the LeHigh laboratory of mechanical engineer Arindam Banerjee, who focuses on investigating the dynamics of fluids and other materials in response to extremely high acceleration and centrifugal force. In this case, his team was exploring what's known as the "instability threshold" of elastic/plastic materials. Scientists have debated whether this comes about because of initial conditions, or whether it's the result of "more local catastrophic processes," according to Banerjee. The question is relevant to a variety of fields, including geophysics, astrophysics, explosive welding, and yes, inertial confinement fusion. [...] The problem is that hydrodynamic instabilities tend to form in the plasma state -- Banerjee likens it to "two materials [that] penetrate one another like fingers" in the presence of gravity or any accelerating field -- which in turn reduces energy yields. The technical term is a Rayleigh-Taylor instability, which occurs between two materials of different densities, where the density and pressure gradients move in opposite directions. Mayonnaise turns out to be an excellent analog for investigating this instability in accelerated solids, with no need for a lab setup with high temperature and pressure conditions, because it's a non-Newtonian fluid. "We use mayonnaise because it behaves like a solid, but when subjected to a pressure gradient, it starts to flow," said Banerjee. "As with a traditional molten metal, if you put a stress on mayonnaise, it will start to deform, but if you remove the stress, it goes back to its original shape. So there's an elastic phase followed by a stable plastic phase. The next phase is when it starts flowing, and that's where the instability kicks in." In 2019, Banerjee's team conducted experiments that "involved pouring Hellman's Real Mayonnaise [...] into a Plexiglass container and then creating wavelike perturbations in the mayo," writes Ars' Jennifer Ouellette. "One experiment involved placing the container on a rotating wheel in the shape of a figure eight and tracking the material with a high-speed camera, using an image processing algorithm to analyze the footage. Their results supported the claim that the instability threshold is dependent on initial conditions, namely amplitude and wavelength." "This latest paper sheds more light on the structural integrity of fusion capsules used in inertial confinement fusion, taking a closer look at the material properties, the amplitude and wavelength conditions, and the acceleration rate of such materials as they hit the Rayleigh-Taylor instability threshold."

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After a 7.1 tremor struck southwestern Japan on Thursday, the country's meteorological agency issued its first-ever alert for a possible "megaquake." It marks the first time the warning has been issued under new rules drawn up after a 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster killed almost 20,000 people. Phys.org reports: The JMA's "megaquake advisory" warns that "if a major earthquake were to occur in the future, strong shaking and large tsunamis would be generated." "The likelihood of a new major earthquake is higher than normal, but this is not an indication that a major earthquake will definitely occur during a specific period of time," it added. The advisory concerns the Nankai Trough "subduction zone" between two tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean, where massive earthquakes have hit in the past. [...] Japan's government has previously said the next magnitude 8-9 megaquake along the Nankai Trough has a roughly 70 percent probability of striking within the next 30 years. In the worst-case scenario 300,000 lives could be lost, experts estimate, with some engineers saying the damage could reach $13 trillion with infrastructure wiped out. "The history of great earthquakes at Nankai is convincingly scary," geologists Kyle Bradley and Judith A Hubbard wrote in their Earthquake Insights newsletter. And "while earthquake prediction is impossible, the occurrence of one earthquake usually does raise the likelihood of another", they explained. "A future great Nankai earthquake is surely the most long-anticipated earthquake in history -- it is the original definition of the 'Big One'."

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The FDA has rejected a first-of-its-kind proposal to use the psychedelic drug MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to drugmaker Lykos Therapeutics. NBC News reports: There had been intense political pressure on the FDA to approve the drug. Friday's decision was the first time the agency had considered a Schedule 1 psychedelic for medical use. If approved, it would have been the first new treatment for PTSD in more than two decades. Lykos Therapeutics had asked the FDA to approve the drug as part of a treatment regimen, given alongside talk therapy. The agency's decision came after an independent advisory committee in June declined to recommend approval of the drug, saying there was not enough evidence that the therapy was safe and effective. The committee cited a myriad of concerns, including poorly designed studies, allegations of sexual misconduct during a midstage clinical trial and the potential for serious health risks after taking the drug, including heart problems and abuse. A review by FDA scientists, published ahead of the June meeting, also raised concerns about how the trials were carried out, including that a number of patients and therapists likely were able to guess who was given the medication and who got the placebo. Despite the rejection, experts say they expect that psychedelic therapies are still on their way to FDA approval. There are around four dozen MDMA trials in various stages of clinical development, according to ClinicalTrials.gov. "I think it will be a temporary setback," said Holly Fernandez Lynch, an associate professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "The advisory committee and FDA gave very clear indications of what they're looking for in terms of study design and adverse event reporting, so Lykos and other companies should know pretty clearly how to proceed going forward if they want to get psychedelics approved."

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Russia has blocked access to the encrypted Signal messaging app to "prevent the messenger's use of terrorist and extremist purposes." YouTube is also facing mass outages following repeated slowdowns in recent weeks. The Associated Press reports: Russian authorities expanded their crackdown on dissent and free media after Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. They have blocked multiple independent Russian-language media outlets critical of the Kremlin, and cut access to Twitter, which later became X, as well as Meta's Facebook and Instagram. In the latest blow to the freedom of information, YouTube faced mass outages on Thursday following repeated slowdowns in recent weeks. Russian authorities have blamed the slowdowns on Google's failure to upgrade its equipment in Russia, but many experts have challenged the claim, arguing that the likely reason for the slowdowns and the latest outage was the Kremlin's desire to shut public access to a major platform that carries opposition views.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Security flaws in your computer's firmware, the deep-seated code that loads first when you turn the machine on and controls even how its operating system boots up, have long been a target for hackers looking for a stealthy foothold. But only rarely does that kind of vulnerability appear not in the firmware of any particular computer maker, but in the chips found across hundreds of millions of PCs and servers. Now security researchers have found one such flaw that has persisted in AMD processors for decades, and that would allow malware to burrow deep enough into a computer's memory that, in many cases, it may be easier to discard a machine than to disinfect it. At the Defcon hacker conference tomorrow, Enrique Nissim and Krzysztof Okupski, researchers from the security firm IOActive, plan to present a vulnerability in AMD chips they're calling Sinkclose. The flaw would allow hackers to run their own code in one of the most privileged modes of an AMD processor, known as System Management Mode, designed to be reserved only for a specific, protected portion of its firmware. IOActive's researchers warn that it affects virtually all AMD chips dating back to 2006, or possibly even earlier. Nissim and Okupski note that exploiting the bug would require hackers to already have obtained relatively deep access to an AMD-based PC or server, but that the Sinkclose flaw would then allow them to plant their malicious code far deeper still. In fact, for any machine with one of the vulnerable AMD chips, the IOActive researchers warn that an attacker could infect the computer with malware known as a "bootkit" that evades antivirus tools and is potentially invisible to the operating system, while offering a hacker full access to tamper with the machine and surveil its activity. For systems with certain faulty configurations in how a computer maker implemented AMD's security feature known as Platform Secure Boot -- which the researchers warn encompasses the large majority of the systems they tested -- a malware infection installed via Sinkclose could be harder yet to detect or remediate, they say, surviving even a reinstallation of the operating system. Only opening a computer's case, physically connecting directly to a certain portion of its memory chips with a hardware-based programming tool known as SPI Flash programmer and meticulously scouring the memory would allow the malware to be removed, Okupski says. Nissim sums up that worst-case scenario in more practical terms: "You basically have to throw your computer away." In a statement shared with WIRED, AMD said it "released mitigation options for its AMD EPYC datacenter products and AMD Ryzen PC products, with mitigations for AMD embedded products coming soon." The company also noted that it released patches for its EPYC processors earlier this year. It did not answer questions about how it intends to fix the Sinkclose vulnerability.

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