Month: July 2021

The animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks was one of our favorite TV shows of 2020, so we've been looking forward to its second season. We won't have long to wait. S2 drops next month on Paramount+, and the studio debuted its first trailer during the Star Trek Universe panel at Comic-Con@Home 2021. That same panel also gave us our first teaser for another new animated series, Star Trek: Prodigy.

(Spoilers for S1 of Star Trek: Lower Decks below.)

As we've reported previously, this is the first animated Star Trek series since the Emmy-award-winning Star Trek: The Animated Series (TAS), which ran from 1973 to 1974. Lower Decks is part of a five-year overall deal that Star Trek: Discovery co-creator and showrunner Alex Kurtzman signed with CBS to expand the franchise. Kurtzman tapped Rick and Morty head writer Mike McMahan to spearhead the project. Chronologically, the show takes place after the events of the 2002 film Star Trek: Nemesis; the name is an homage to an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG). 

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  NASA has selected SpaceX's Falcon Heavy to launch the Europa Clipper, the first mission to conduct detailed reconnaissance of this Jovian moon. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]

After years of speculation, NASA officially announced Friday that SpaceX's Falcon Heavy would launch arguably the space agency's most important Solar System exploration mission of the 2020s—the Europa Clipper.

Slated to launch in October 2024, the $4.25 billion mission will spend much of the remainder of this decade flying to the Jovian system before entering an elongated orbit around Jupiter. The spacecraft will then make as many as 44 flybys of Europa, the intriguing, ice-encrusted Jovian moon that scientists believe harbors a vast ocean beneath the surface. It is possible that aquatic life exists there.

The total contract award amount for launch services is approximately $178 million, NASA said in a news release. This is a significant moment for SpaceX, as the company will be entrusted with one of NASA's highest priority exploration missions. The deal also saves NASA about $2 billion.

Enlarge / This photo has a job application for Boston University hidden within it. The technique introduced by Wang, Liu, and Cui could hide data inside an image classifier rather than just an image. (credit: Keith McDuffy CC-BY 2.0)

Researchers Zhi Wang, Chaoge Liu, and Xiang Cui published a paper last Monday demonstrating a new technique for slipping malware past automated detection tools—in this case, by hiding it inside a neural network.

The three embedded 36.9MiB of malware into a 178MiB AlexNet model without significantly altering the function of the model itself. The malware-embedded model classified images with near-identical accuracy, within 1% of the malware-free model. (This is possible because the number of layers and total neurons in a convolutional neural network is fixed prior to training—which means that, much like in human brains, many of the neurons in a trained model end up being either largely or entirely dormant.)

Just as importantly, squirreling the malware away into the model broke it up in ways that prevented detection by standard antivirus engines. VirusTotal, a service that "inspects items with over 70 antivirus scanners and URL/domain blocklisting services, in addition to a myriad of tools to extract signals from the studied content," did not raise any suspicions about the malware-embedded model.

Enlarge / The exterior of the headquarters of biotechnology company Biogen in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (credit: Getty | Boston Globe)

Do you ever forget things, like a doctor's appointment or a lunch date? Do you sometimes struggle to think of the right word for something common? Do you ever feel more anxious or irritable than you typically do? Do you ever feel overwhelmed when trying to make a decision?

If you answered "no, never" to all of those questions, there's a possibility that you may not actually be human. Nevertheless, you should still talk to a doctor about additional cognitive screenings to check if you have Alzheimer's disease. At least, that's the takeaway from a six-question quiz provided, in part, by Biogen, the maker of an unproven, $56,000 Alzheimer's drug.

The six questions include the four above, plus questions about whether you ever lose your train of thought or ever get lost on your way to or around a familiar place. The questions not only bring up common issues that perfectly healthy people might face from time to time, but the answers any quiz-taker provides are also completely irrelevant. No matter how you answer—even if you say you never experience any of those issues—the quiz will always prompt you to talk with your doctor about cognitive screening. The results page even uses your zip code to provide a link to find an Alzheimer's specialist near you.