Toggle light / dark theme

Researchers Detail Bitter APT’s Evolving Tactics as Its Geographic Scope Expands

Stating that Bitter frequently singles out an “exceedingly small subset of targets,” Proofpoint said the attacks are aimed at governments, diplomatic entities, and defense organizations so as to enable intelligence collection on foreign policy or current affairs.

Attack chains mounted by the group typically leverage spear-phishing emails, with the messages sent from providers like 163[.]com, 126[.]com, and ProtonMail, as well as compromised accounts associated with the governments of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Madagascar.

The threat actor has also been observed masquerading as government and diplomatic entities from China, Madagascar, Mauritius, and South Korea in these campaigns to entice recipients into malware-laced attachments that trigger the deployment of malware.

Physicists test scientific approach to unidentified anomalous phenomena research

A team of physicists from the University at Albany has proposed scientifically rigorous methods for documenting and analyzing Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) building upon the work of numerous past and present researchers in the field.

The team tested their methods in the field for the first time and reported their findings in Progress in Aerospace Sciences.

UAP is the term used by like NASA to refer to “observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known .”

Elon Musk Serves Up New Starship Program Information

SpaceX is making significant advancements in its Starship program, with plans for increased production, upcoming Mars missions, and ongoing developments in technology and infrastructure, despite facing some challenges ## ## Questions to inspire discussion.

🚀 Q: What is SpaceX’s target for Starship launches to Mars in 2026? A: SpaceX aims to launch 5 Starships to Mars in 2026, with Elon Musk estimating a 50/50 chance of meeting the 2026 Mars window.

🌎 Q: Which region on Mars is the primary landing target? A: The Arcadia region is the top candidate for landing locations due to its large ice deposits. Mission Objectives.

🛰️ Q: What is the main goal of the first Starship flight to Mars? A: The first flight aims to prove the ability to reach Mars by sending minimum viable vehicles to maximize learning and demonstrate key technologies.

🏗️ Q: What are the objectives for the second Starship flight to Mars? A: The second flight will focus on landing initial infrastructure, confirming resource availability, preparing landing areas, and delivering equipment for future human missions. Resource Utilization.

⛏️ Q: What are the key goals for the third Starship flight to Mars? A: The third flight will prioritize resource mining, propellant generation, road and pad construction, habitat building, and increasing power generation and storage.

Space: Northrop Grumman is a space pioneer, supporting government, civil and commercial customers in solving their biggest challenges

Our forward-leaning, innovative spirit is backed by a legacy of expertise that began at the dawn of the space age.

Our mission experience in space runs deep, we know our customers well, and our capabilities are unmatched. This is what allows us to provide reliable, agile and affordable space solutions to best serve our customers.

From defending freedom to advancing human discovery, we are defining what is possible in space every day.

Plan to harvest helium-3 from lunar surface reaches prototyping milestone

A US startup is looking to our closest satellite to fill a resources gap here on Earth. Helium-3 is rare on terra firma, but is thought to be abundant in the regolith of the Moon. Interlune has now revealed a full-scale excavator prototype that forms a key component of its lunar Harvester.

The shortage of helium-3 – a stable isotope of helium important for applications ranging from energy production to medical research – was first identified in the US toward the middle of 2008. The US government officially recognized the issue in early 2009, and mitigation efforts put in place.

“The United States supply of 3He comes from the decay of tritium (3H), which the Nation had in large quantities because of our nuclear weapons complex; however, the tritium stockpile has declined in recent years through radioactive decay and is expected to decline in the future because of reduced demand for tritium,” read the intro to a National Isotope Development Center newsletter from 2014.

US startup unveils prototype of excavator to mine helium-3 from moon

Interestingly, however, despite Komatsu’s early lead, Vermeer and Interlune seem to have caught up and could be ahead. For example, the new prototype is bigger and full-scale, showing great promise through testing.

The Vermeer-Interlune excavator has a larger excavation capacity, more funding and government support. To this end, Interlune is targeting a lunar mission by 2030.

“The high-rate excavation needed to harvest helium-3 from the moon in large quantities has never been attempted before, let alone with high efficiency,” said Gary Lai, Interlune co-founder and CTO.

CNS-CLIP: Transforming a Neurosurgical Journal Into a… : Neurosurgery

Classical biomedical data science models are trained on a single modality and aimed at one specific task. However, the exponential increase in the size and capabilities of the foundation models inside and outside medicine shows a shift toward task-agnostic models using large-scale, often internet-based, data. Recent research into smaller foundation models trained on specific literature, such as programming textbooks, demonstrated that they can display capabilities similar to or superior to large generalist models, suggesting a potential middle ground between small task-specific and large foundation models. This study attempts to introduce a domain-specific multimodal model, Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS)-Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP), developed for neurosurgical applications, leveraging data exclusively from Neurosurgery Publications.

METHODS:

We constructed a multimodal data set of articles from Neurosurgery Publications through PDF data collection and figure-caption extraction using an artificial intelligence pipeline for quality control. Our final data set included 24 021 figure-caption pairs. We then developed a fine-tuning protocol for the OpenAI CLIP model. The model was evaluated on tasks including neurosurgical information retrieval, computed tomography imaging classification, and zero-shot ImageNet classification.

/* */