Lifeboat Foundation

Communicating with far-off Mars is hard, but new satellite arrangements could make things easier for future missions.

A few years from now, a small radio telescope on the far side of the moon could help scientists peer into the universe’s ancient past.

The moon instrument, called the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night), is a pathfinder being developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, the Space Science Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

Have you ever wondered what life would be like if artificial intelligence became too powerful?

A new exhibition titled the ‘Misalignment Museum’ has opened to the public in San Francisco — the beating heart of the tech revolution — looks to explore just that, and features AI artworks meant to help visitors think about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

The exhibits in this temporary show mix the disturbing with the comic, and this first display has AI give pithy observations to visitors that cross into its line of vision.

A project to map the earliest structures of the universe has found 15,000 more galaxies in its first snapshot than captured in an entire deep field survey conducted 20 years ago.

The James Webb Space Telescope, the new preeminent observatory in the sky, saw about 25,000 galaxies in that single image, dramatically surpassing the nearly 10,000 shown in the Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field Survey (Opens in a new tab). Scientists say that little piece of the space pie represents just four percent of the data they’ll discover from the new Webb survey by the time it’s completed next year.

“When it is finished, this deep field will be astoundingly large and overwhelmingly beautiful,” said Caitlin Casey, a University of Texas at Austin astronomer co-leading the investigation, in a statement (Opens in a new tab).

Learning that your whole life is a lie while you’re trapped in space is a tough combo.

“For the first time ever, we kind of have a time-traveling machine going in both directions,” said Sonja Franke-Arnold, a quantum physicist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland who was not involved in the research.

Regrettably for science fiction fans, the devices have nothing in common with a 1982 DeLorean. Throughout the experiments, which were conducted by two independent teams in China and Austria, laboratory clocks continued to tick steadily forward. Only the photons flitting through the circuitry experienced temporal shenanigans. And even for the photons, researchers debate whether the flipping of time’s arrow is real or simulated.

A third-party vendor hack exposed millions of AT&T customers’ account information, including names, phone numbers, and email addresses.

Researchers on Wednesday announced a major cybersecurity find—the world’s first-known instance of real-world malware that can hijack a computer’s boot process even when Secure Boot and other advanced protections are enabled and running on fully updated versions of Windows.

Dubbed BlackLotus, the malware is what’s known as a UEFI bootkit. These sophisticated pieces of malware target the UEFI—short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface —the low-level and complex chain of firmware responsible for booting up virtually every modern computer. As the mechanism that bridges a PC’s device firmware with its operating system, the UEFI is an OS in its own right. It’s located in an SPI-connected flash storage chip soldered onto the computer motherboard, making it difficult to inspect or patch. Previously discovered bootkits such as CosmicStrand, MosaicRegressor, and MoonBounce work by targeting the UEFI firmware stored in the flash storage chip. Others, including BlackLotus, target the software stored in the EFI system partition.

Because the UEFI is the first thing to run when a computer is turned on, it influences the OS, security apps, and all other software that follows. These traits make the UEFI the perfect place to launch malware. When successful, UEFI bootkits disable OS security mechanisms and ensure that a computer remains infected with stealthy malware that runs at the kernel mode or user mode, even after the operating system is reinstalled or a hard drive is replaced.

A scaled-up spintronic probabilistic computer.