Month: October 2019

Enlarge / The VSS Unity spacecraft rockets to space on its first spaceflight. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

On Wednesday, Virgin Galactic signed an agreement with the Italian Air Force to have humans fly on board its suborbital spacecraft and conduct scientific research.

The deal marks the first time a government has bought a ride on a private, suborbital space mission to conduct any kind of human-led experiments. The first research flight could take place as early as next year, the company said.

“We’re delighted to work with the Italian Air Force to further space-based research and technology development through this historic mission," Virgin's chief executive, George Whitesides, said in a news release.

Enlarge / You're never too young for experimental archaeology. (credit: Helena Seidl da Fonseca)

A recent study found that prehistoric babies drank milk from ceramic sippy cups, including some with cute animal motifs. Lest you be overwhelmed by the cuteness, there's a heartbreaking side to that discovery: Bronze and Iron Age parents buried their dead infants with their clay sippy cups.

A team of archaeologists found microscopic traces of livestock milk in three of the containers: two from Iron Age graves in Germany dating between 800 and 450 BCE, and a broken one from a much earlier Bronze Age grave nearby. The results suggest that feeding babies milk from livestock may have helped early European farming populations grow and expand.

Not kidding around

Archaeologists have reconstructed surprising details of ancient people’s lives, but they still know relatively little about how infants and children in the ancient past lived. “Infants and children were mainly ignored in archaeology until about 20 years ago,” anthropologist Sian Halcrow of the University of Otago, who was not involved in the study, told Ars Technica. “Research projects that are interested in children are starting to re-examine previous assumptions about activities and objects in archaeology—some items that were thought to be ritualistic are in fact child toys.”

Enlarge / Some people need Password Checkup more than others.

Back in February, Google introduced a Chrome extension called Password Checkup—a plug-in that tapped into Google's collection of account breach data and warned users of exposed passwords. Now, Google has directly integrated Password Checkup into its password manager, allowing users to check passwords from within their Google account settings—from any browser.

Password Checkup is now accessible from passwords.google.com, either from within a Web browser or the Google mobile application (within account settings). After verifying the user's identity with an account login prompt, Password Checkup examines any Web passwords saved within Chrome that are synchronized using a Google account—checking against breach data and looking for re-used and weak passwords. Users can go straight to the sites with bad passwords using the "Change Password" button provided next to each compromised or weak password.

• 

  Password Checkup, the plug-in, still works to warn if a specific site has a bad password and updates you on passwords found in recent breaches.

Wait, so Google has all my passwords?

The Password Checkup plug-in leverages a Google security Web application interface, which only sends hashes of passwords to be checked securely against a remote database made up of data culled from password dumps on underground marketplaces. Back in February, Google staff research scientist Kurt Thomas explained that the plug-in's API uses a combination of anonymization and cryptography to protect the exchange, using a technique called "blinding" to create a secret search index. Credentials are anonymized with an Argon2 hash function to create a search key for Google's database and encrypted with Elliptic Curve cryptography. "On your end, you get an index that only you know," said Thomas—an index based on partial data that can't be used to recreate the passwords themselves.

Enlarge / DeepScale CEO Forrest Iandola, shown here in a 2013 photo, is Tesla's latest machine learning guru. (credit: D Coetzee)

Tesla has acquired the machine learning startup DeepScale, CNBC, Techcrunch, and other news outlets have reported. The company's CEO, Forrest Iandola, announced Monday that he had joined Tesla's Autopilot team.

Iandola explained his company's mission to Ars during a phone call, just after the company raised $15 million from venture capitalists in April 2018. DeepScale was building image recognition software based on convolutional neural networks.

A key step for any self-driving software system is perception: identifying cars, pedestrians, bicycles, and other objects around the car. Identifying objects accurately is crucial because it allows software to make informed predictions about where they might move in the future. Most companies working on the problem use a technique called "convolutional neural networks" (CNNs) to tackle this problem. You can check out our deep dive on CNNs for full details on how they work.