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After a long, seven-year development, an experimental fusion reactor in the UK has been successfully powered on for the time, achieving ‘first plasma’: confirmation that all its components can work together to heat hydrogen gas into the plasma phase of matter.

This transition – achieved last week by a machine called MAST Upgrade in Culham, Oxfordshire – is the fundamental ingredient of a working nuclear fusion reactor, a dream scientists have been trying to realise for decades.

In nuclear fusion, the nuclei of two or more lighter elements fuse into a heavier nucleus, and release energy. This phenomenon is what goes on in the heart of the Sun, and if we can recreate and maintain the same reactions on Earth at sufficient scale, we stand to reap the rewards of clean, virtually limitless, low-carbon energy.

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Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have gained a better understanding of a promising method for improving the confinement of superhot fusion plasma using magnetic fields. Improved plasma confinement could enable a fusion reactor called a spherical tokamak to be built smaller and less expensively, moving the world closer to reproducing on Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars.

The improved confinement is made possible by the so-called enhanced pedestal (EP) H-mode, a variety of the high performance, or H-mode, that has been observed for decades in tokamaks around the world. When a enters H-mode, it requires less heating to get to the superhot temperatures necessary for fusion reactions.

The new understanding reveals some of the underlying mechanics of EP H-mode, a condition that researchers discovered more than a decade ago. Scientists led by physicists at PPPL have now found that the EP H-mode improves upon H-mode in spherical tokamaks by lowering the density of the plasma edge.

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Blizzard president J. Allen Brack said the system has dramatically reduced toxic chat and repeating offenses.

In April 2019, Blizzard shared some insights into how it was using machine learning to combat abusive chat in games like Overwatch. It’s a very complicated process, obviously, but it appears to be working out: Blizzard president J. Allen Brack said in a new Fireside Chat video that it has resulted in an “incredible decrease” in toxic behavior.

“Part of having a good game experience is finding ways to ensure that all are welcome within the worlds, no matter their background or identity,” Brack says in the video. “Something we’ve spoken about publicly a little bit in the past is our machine learning system that helps us verify player reports around offensive behavior and offensive language.”

Continue reading “Overwatch toxicity has seen an ‘incredible decrease’ thanks to machine learning, says Blizzard” | >

A new $32,000 electric camper is getting some hype this week, but we are highly skeptical about the vehicle. Is it a scam?

Electric Brands, a Germany-based startup, has been taking reservations and investments for what it calls the eBussy, a modular electric vehicle platform that can be configured in different vehicles, including an electric camper.

Several media outlets have been reporting on the project this week, resulting in thousands of reservations for the vehicle.

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O,.o wut?

Cosmic Loners

The problem with the GEODE hypothesis is that the strange objects need to resemble but not act like black holes. The only way that GEODEs could expand the universe without destroying everything around them is if they were isolated in empty pockets of the cosmos. But black holes often sit smack dab in the middle of galaxies.

“This becomes a problem if you want to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe,” lead author Kevin Croker said in a press release. “If they moved like black holes, staying close to visible matter, galaxies like our own Milky Way would have been disrupted.”

Continue reading “Physicists: Fake Black Holes Could Be Pulling the Universe Apart” | >

On Oct. 15, 2020, a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh returned an indictment charging six computer hackers, all of whom were residents and nationals of the Russian Federation (Russia) and officers in Unit 74455 of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), a military intelligence agency of the General Staff of the Armed Forces.

These GRU hackers and their co-conspirators engaged in computer intrusions and attacks intended to support Russian government efforts to undermine, retaliate against, or otherwise destabilize: (1) Ukraine; (2) Georgia; (3) elections in France; (4) efforts to hold Russia accountable for its use of a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok, on foreign soil; and (5) the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games after Russian athletes were banned from participating under their nation’s flag, as a consequence of Russian government-sponsored doping effort.

Their computer attacks used some of the world’s most destructive malware to date, including: KillDisk and Industroyer, which each caused blackouts in Ukraine; NotPetya, which caused nearly $1 billion in losses to the three victims identified in the indictment alone; and Olympic Destroyer, which disrupted thousands of computers used to support the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. The indictment charges the defendants with conspiracy, computer hacking, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and false registration of a domain name.

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In the last few years, countless cyber-attacks were reported globally that were linked to the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese cyber-hackers, who target the foreign networks and websites are sponsored by the Chinese government. They are highly trained and have acquired abilities not only to exploit common vulnerabilities but also to discover and even create new vulnerabilities.

The US National Security Agency’s in-depth report of 23rd October points out that one of the greatest threats to the US National Security Systems, Defence Industrial Base and Department of Defence information networks is the “Chinese state sponsored malicious cyber activity”. The report underlines that the Chinese hackers exploit “computer networks of interest that hold sensitive intellectual property, economic, political, and military information.”

In July 2020, US had ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Huston, when it discovered that the Chinese officials there were involved in the intellectual property theft and indicted two Chinese nationals for allegedly hacking hundreds of companies and crucially had attempted to steal coronavirus vaccine research. The United States Department of Justice has charged five Chinese national for their involvement in hacking targets not only in the US governments but also the networks of the Indian and Vietnam government. They also carried out attacks on the UK government network unsuccessfully.

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