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Laser mining would allow for a no explosive option and not need huge machines increasing output as well. Also lasers could make more precise cuts rather than blades which would never get dull.


The application of the “Graduated Optical Colimator” (GOC) for the mining industry consists of a one-kilowatt optical power fiber laser to selectively spall igneous geological formations containing narrow veins of precious metals.

Merger said the prototype addresses key issues like mining using less explosives, chemicals and waste.

Why an upcoming mission to Phobos may reveal something spectacular.


Both NASA and the European Space Agency are operating or planning major missions to — and back from — the Red Planet in a hunt for signs the once wet planet also hosted microbial life forms.

But it’s possible the best place to look for life on Mars isn’t on Mars at all.

In a new perspective published Thursday in the journal Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) scientists Ryuki Hyodo and Tomohiro Usui explain why JAXA believes the Martian moon Phobos could provide a unique opportunity to assess whether Mars ever contained life, and how the space agency’s upcoming Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission plans to test that hypothesis in 2024.

New algorithm could enable fast, nimble drones for time-critical operations such as search and rescue.

If you follow autonomous drone racing, you likely remember the crashes as much as the wins. In drone racing, teams compete to see which vehicle is better trained to fly fastest through an obstacle course. But the faster drones fly, the more unstable they become, and at high speeds their aerodynamics can be too complicated to predict. Crashes, therefore, are a common and often spectacular occurrence.

Uptycs Threat Research Team has discovered malware that not only hijacks vulnerable *nix-based servers and uses them to mine cryptocurrency but actually modifies their CPU configurations in a bid to increase mining performance at the cost of performance in other applications.

Perpetrators use a Golang-based worm to exploit known vulnerabilities like CVE-2020–14882 (Oracle WebLogic) and CVE-2017–11610 (Supervisord) to gain access to Linux systems, reports The Record. Once they hijack a machine, they use model-specific registers (MSR) to disable the hardware prefetcher, a unit that fetches data and instructions from the memory into the L2 cache before they are needed.