Month: August 2022

Enlarge / Stacey Morgan and her four children watch Drew Morgan launch in July 2019. (credit: Stacey Morgan)

One of the very first things that a new NASA astronaut learns is that there is no "I" in team. As part of their nearly two years of training before becoming eligible for flight assignments, prospective astronauts are told not to use the space agency, or their spaceflight status, for self-promotion.

The mission comes first, and while astronauts may be the most visible part of the NASA team, they are there to represent the agency and not themselves. Some recent astronauts who used their spaceflights to successfully boost their public profiles—such a Chris Hadfield and Scott Kelly—did so knowing they never intended to fly again. That's not to say that Hadfield and Kelly were not great astronauts, nor team players. It's just that astronauts who want to earn future flight assignments don't call attention to themselves.

This ironclad rule makes the recent publication of a book by Stacey Morgan, The Astronaut's Wife, notable. In the book Morgan tells the story of her relationship with her husband, Drew Morgan, whom she met at West Point when they were both undergraduates. The narrative includes stories about their four children, life lessons, and Scripture references; but the centerpiece of the book concerns Morgan's spaceflight from July 2019 to April 2020.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

I am not a data scientist. And while I know my way around a Jupyter notebook and have written a good amount of Python code, I do not profess to be anything close to a machine learning expert. So when I performed the first part of our no-code/low-code machine learning experiment and got better than a 90 percent accuracy rate on a model, I suspected I had done something wrong.

If you haven't been following along thus far, here's a quick review before I direct you back to the first two articles in this series. To see how much machine learning tools for the rest of us had advanced—and to redeem myself for the unwinnable task I had been assigned with machine learning last year—I took a well-worn heart attack data set from an archive at the University of California-Irvine and tried to outperform data science students' results using the "easy button" of Amazon Web Services' low-code and no-code tools.

The whole point of this experiment was to see:

Enlarge (credit: HUM Images | Getty)

Farmers around the world have turned to tractor hacking so they can bypass the digital locks that manufacturers impose on their vehicles. Like insulin pump “looping” and iPhone jailbreaking, this allows farmers to modify and repair the expensive equipment that’s vital to their work, the way they could with analog tractors. At the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas on Saturday, the hacker known as Sick Codes is presenting a new jailbreak for John Deere & Co. tractors that allows him to take control of multiple models through their touchscreens.

The finding underscores the security implications of the right-to-repair movement. The tractor exploitation that Sick Codes uncovered isn't a remote attack, but the vulnerabilities involved represent fundamental insecurities in the devices that could be exploited by malicious actors or potentially chained with other vulnerabilities. Securing the agriculture industry and food supply chain is crucial, as incidents like the 2021 JBS Meat ransomware attack have shown. At the same time, though, vulnerabilities like the ones that Sick Codes found help farmers do what they need to do with their own equipment.

John Deere did not respond to WIRED's request for comment about the research.

Enlarge (credit: KATERYNA KON)

Vertebrates such as ourselves rely on a complicated, multi-layer immune system to limit the impact of pathogens. Specialized B and T cells play a central role by recognizing specific pathogens and providing a memory of past infections.

Obviously, single-celled organisms like bacteria and archaea can't take the same approach. But that doesn't mean they're defenseless. They also have an adaptive defense system that maintains a memory of past infections (and happens to make a great gene editing tool). Now, researchers have found that a family of related proteins is used to fight viruses in organisms ranging from bacteria to humans. While the effects it triggers vary among organisms, it appears to be capable of recognizing a wide range of viruses.

Finding family members

Mammals have a family of immune proteins called STAND (for reasons that are unimportant) that are part of what calls the innate immune system. This arm of our immune system doesn't recognize specific pathogens; instead, it recognizes general features of infection, such as molecules that are found on the surface of most bacteria.