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Category: space – Page 365

Researchers test effects of baby seal robots on potential Mars dwellers

The AI-powered cuddling robots could provide therapy for future astronauts.

Japan is seeking to one day launch adorable robotic seals called Paros into space, according to an article by the South China Morning Post (SCMP)

The company has already undertaken a two-week simulation of a Mars mission at the U.S.-based Mars Desert Research Station, operated by the Mars Society in Utah.

ParoRobots.com.

The aim is that these cuddly AI-driven machines will help astronauts cope with stress and even provide companionship on the Red Planet.

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China’s AI Implementation Is Edging Ahead Of The US

As Kaifu Lee, a keen observer of AI development in China has put it, “we’re now in the age of AI implementation.” While the West, the U.S. and Canada in particular, will remain ahead in AI research, those Western advances are quickly adopted in China where the massive market, a surfeit of young engineers, government support and a cutthroat entrepreneurial culture are driving industrial innovation in AI.

“The digital and real economies are accelerating their integration,” said Baidu’s Chief Technology Officer, Haifeng Wang, who is also Head of Baidu Research.

China’s 14th Five-Year Plan and Vision 2030 both place a strong focus on the development of the digital economy, seeing this sector as a source of tremendous untapped innovative power and space for growth.

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15 years ago, a spacecraft swung by Mercury to beat the Sun’s gravity

Anyone who has visited the small island of Venice, full of its romantic canals and pedestrian paths with abrupt dead ends aplenty, knows that distance does not always go hand in hand with navigational ease. Fifteen years ago, NASA performed one of its most complex navigational routes to reach the Solar System’s smallest planet: Mercury. The MESSENGER mission made its first flyby of Mercury 15 years ago today, January 14, 2008, with two more flybys of the planet after, with NASA finally inserting it into orbit on April 4, 2011.

Between its launch on April 3, 2004, at Cape Canaveral and its orbital insertion in 2011, MESSENGER had a total of six flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury. However, these weren’t just passive flybys; they were gravitational assists. Sean Solomon, the principal investigator of the MESSENGER mission and former director / current adjunct senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, tells Inverse that the challenge isn’t so much getting to Mercury, but getting into orbit.

“By celestial mechanics, if you send a spacecraft in towards the Sun and gain speed from the gravitational well of the Sun without slowing down en route, the speed is about 10 km/s,” Solomon explains. “That’s too fast to do an orbital insertion with a propulsive burn using any conventional propulsion system that you can carry.”

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Critical zero day vulnerability in Linux Kernel Allows DoS Attack

This flaw, which has been identified that affects the ksmbd NTLMv2 authentication in the Linux kernel, is known to quickly cause the operating system on Linux-based computers to crash. Namjae Jeon is the developer of KSMBD, which is an open-source In-kernel CIFS/SMB3 server designed for the Linux Kernel. It is an implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol in the kernel space that allows for the sharing of IPC services and files over a network.

In order to take advantage of the vulnerability, you will need to transmit corrupted packets to the server, personal computer, tablet, or smartphone that you are targeting. The attack causes what is known as “a memory overflow flaw in ksmbd decodentlmssp auth blob,” which states that nt len may be less than CIFS ENCPWD SIZE in some circumstances. Because of this, the blen parameter that is sent to ksmbd authntlmv2, which runs memcpy using blen on memory that was allocated by kmalloc(blen + CIFS CRYPTO KEY SIZE), is now negative. It is important to take note that the CIFS ENCPWD SIZE value is 16, and the CIFS CRYPTO KEY SIZE value is 8. As the heap overflow happens when blen is in the range [-8,-1], we think that the only possible outcome of this problem is a remote denial of service and not a privilege escalation or a remote code execution.

The vulnerability is caused by the way that the Linux kernel handles NTLMv2 authentication in versions 5.15-rc1 and later. The developers of the Linux kernel have not made a fix available.

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Astronomers find a group of zombie stars 20 times hotter than the Sun

Of course, all stars are hot compared with anything we’re used to here on Earth. But while the Sun’s surface chills at a steady 6,000 degrees Kelvin, these stars’ extreme temperatures range from 100,000 to 180,000 degrees.

These are “stars which are a little bit outside the canonical evolution,” Klaus Werner of the University of Tuebingen’s Kepler Centre for Astro and Particle Physics, a co-author of the paper, tells Inverse. “These stars are strange.”

Even among the ultra-hot white dwarfs known by the designation PG1159, the selection that cropped up in this survey lack the helium normally found in their atmosphere: instead, they’ve burned it all away, fusing it into a solar atmosphere of pure carbon and oxygen.

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Webb Confirms Its First Exoplanet

Researchers confirmed an exoplanet, a planet that orbits another star, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for the first time. Formally classified as LHS 475 b, the planet is almost exactly the same size as our own, clocking in at 99% of Earth’s diameter. The research team is led by Kevin Stevenson and Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, both of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

The planet is rocky and almost precisely the same size as Earth, but whips around its star in only two days.

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