Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: internet – Page 41

SpaceX Falcon 9 cleared to launch by FAA; next launch: Starlink overnight

Three days ago, an old Falcon 9 booster crashed and exploded while landing on a drone ship during its 23rd landing. This caused SpaceX to halt the launch of another Falcon 9 rocket scheduled a few hours later while they worked on the problem.

3 days later, SpaceX had already corrected the problem and did two more Falcon 9 launches and landings. The 3 days included one day to get permission from the Federal government to launch again.

No other space company moves this fast! Normally, a space company takes a year or two to recover from an accident.

For example, NASA didn’t launch again for over 2 1/2 years after the Challenger accident and again didn’t launch again for over 2 1/2 years after the Columbia accident. These massive delays didn’t even contribute much to safety. For example, the last time a Falcon 9 booster crashed and exploded was over 250 missions ago, more missions than all the Space Shuttles flew in total! The last time SpaceX actually lost customer cargo was 351 flights ago! (The Space Shuttle had a total of 135 flights, 2 being failures that killed a total of 14 people.)

Again, talking about safety, the Columbia blew up because its heat shield tiles failed. Well, in the last Starship test, many heat shield tiles failed although it landed safely, so Elon made a ton of changes to Starship including adding ablative shielding under critical heat shield tiles. The Space Shuttle never got protective ablative shielding, an example of why it had a poor safety record.

The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch the Falcon 9 while the investigation into Wednesday’s mishap wraps up.

New Experiment Brings The Quantum Internet a Step Closer to Reality

While the idea of a quantum internet has a huge amount of potential, getting it hooked up to the regular old internet has its challenges.

Now a new study hints at how existing and future networks could be combined.

An experiment conducted by researchers from Leibniz University Hannover in Germany show how quantum information and the classic 1s and 0s of conventional data could be beamed down the same optical fiber.

Scientists develop DMG equalization strategy via femtosecond laser micromachining induced refractive index tailoring

Optical fiber, as a physical medium for information transmission, is the “highway” of modern economic and social development. However, with the continuous emergence of high-speed and high-capacity communication scenarios such as virtual reality, 5G, intelligent driving, and the Internet of Things (IoT), there is an upper limit to the communication capacity (traffic flow) of the traditional single-mode fiber-optic communication system (highway).

NASA’s Moon Launcher Is in Big Trouble

Reports that each of NASA’s Artemis launches could cost as much as $4.1 billion…

“Costs going up faster than the tower,” self-described internet rocket scientist Scott Manley joked at the time.

NASA used its Mobile Launcher 1 for its inaugural — albeit uncrewed — Artemis mission in late 2022. According to a 2020 audit, the tower, which was originally built for NASA’s canceled Constellation program, cost $234 million to develop.

Humanoid robots are coming

Picking up a box and placing it in a neat pile is not an impressive action in itself for a robot; understanding an enigmatic human command and correctly deciphering and explaining the decision-making process, are definitely innovations. Digit owes parts of its progress to the generative artificial intelligence revolution that also reached the field of robotics and turned expectations from it on its head. “I’ve been asked what’s the biggest thing in 2024 besides language modeling — it’s robotics. Period,” Nvidia’s senior AI scientist Jim Fan wrote in December. “We’re about three years away from a ChatGPT moment for physical AI agents,” he explained.

Ever since Fan made this statement, it seems that everyone is talking about the “ChatGPT moment of robotics”, or the hope of a technological breakthrough that will push the field forward and finally fill our homes with intelligent humanoid robots to help us with household chores, wash the floor, set the table or do the laundry (but not fold it). “What has been happening in recent months is dramatic,” explains Amir Bousani, CEO of R-Go Robotics, which recently entered into a partnership with Nvidia to equip the robot it is developing with its spatial perception capabilities. “The physical world is more difficult than the internet,” notes Dr. Oren Etzioni, founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, “but the field of robots that have the ability to behave in general is running much faster today.”

The huge interest in humanoid robots, or humanoids, which Fan is talking about, is evident in the constant announcements in the field: in February, the startup Figure raised $675 million from Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and OpenAI for the development of the humanoid. In March, Nvidia’s CEO stood on the stage of the company’s developer conference alongside nine humanoids from different companies and announced that building models for robots is “one of the most exciting problems to solve in artificial intelligence”; in April, Elon Musk promised that he would launch the humanoid robot he is developing — Optimus — next year and predicted that by 2040 there will be a billion humanoids among us. A short time later, the activities of Mentee Robotics, Amnon Shashua’s company that was founded two years ago and also develops the humanoid, went public.

Nonsurgical Neural Interfaces Could Significantly Expand Use of Neurotechnology

Noninvasive braincomputer interfaces could vastly improve brain computer control.

Over the past two decades, the international biomedical research community has demonstrated increasingly sophisticated ways to allow a person’s brain to communicate with a device, allowing breakthroughs aimed at improving quality of life, such as access to computers and the internet, and more recently control of a prosthetic limb. DARPA has been at the forefront of this research.

The state of the art in brain-system communications has employed invasive techniques that allow precise, high-quality connections to specific neurons or groups of neurons. These techniques have helped patients with brain injury and other illnesses. However, these techniques are not appropriate for able-bodied people. DARPA now seeks to achieve high levels of brain-system communications without surgery, in its new program, Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3).

“DARPA created N3 to pursue a path to a safe, portable neural interface system capable of reading from and writing to multiple points in the brain at once,” said Dr. Al Emondi, program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO). “High-resolution, nonsurgical neurotechnology has been elusive, but thanks to recent advances in biomedical engineering, neuroscience, synthetic biology, and nanotechnology, we now believe the goal is attainable.”

Test of a prototype quantum internet runs under New York City for half a month

To introduce quantum networks into the marketplace, engineers must overcome the fragility of entangled states in a fiber cable and ensure the efficiency of signal delivery. Now, scientists at Qunnect Inc. in Brooklyn, New York, have taken a large step forward by operating just such a network under the streets of New York City.

Advanced orbital angular momentum mode switching in multimode fiber utilizing an optical neural network chip

The rapid development of technologies such as the internet, mobile communications, and artificial intelligence has dramatically increased the demand for high-capacity communication systems. Among various solutions, mode-division multiplexing (MDM) has emerged as a crucial technique, utilizing spatial modes like orbital angular momentum (OAM) to enhance communication capacity.

Computer scientists discover vulnerabilities in a popular security protocol

A widely used security protocol that dates back to the days of dial-up internet has vulnerabilities that could expose large numbers of networked devices to an attack and allow an attacker to gain control of traffic on an organization’s network.

A research team led by University of California San Diego computer scientists investigated the Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) protocol and found a vulnerability they call Blast-RADIUS that has been present for decades. RADIUS, designed in 1991, allows networked devices such as routers, switches or mobile roaming gear to use a to validate login or other credentials.

This is a common set-up in enterprise and because it allows credentials to be centrally managed. As a result, RADIUS is a critical part of modern telecommunications and enterprise networks; in large enterprises, it may control access to tens of thousands of switches.

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