Month: September 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty | REDA&CO)

The US Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday proposed a long-awaited revision to the definition of the term "healthy" on food packaging—finally scrapping the mind-boggling criteria from the 1990s that made healthful foods such as nuts, salmon, avocados, olive oil, and even water ineligible for the label.

The new definition is not immune to criticism, and Americans are likely to still face uncertainty about healthy food choices as they stroll grocery store aisles. But, the proposed update—which coincides with this week's White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health and a national strategy to improve US nutrition and reduce hunger—is a clear improvement.

Under the current criteria, established in 1994, the FDA allows food manufacturers to label their products as "healthy" based on myopic maximums and minimums of specific nutrients. That means "healthy" foods have universal maximums for saturated fat, total fat, cholesterol, and sodium, and are also required to provide at least 10 percent of the daily value for one or more of the following nutrients: vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, iron, protein, and fiber.

Enlarge / The crew of Polaris Dawn, from left: Scott Poteet, Jared Isaacman, Sarah Gillis, and Anna Menon, pose in front of SpaceX's Super Heavy rocket in South Texas. (credit: John Kraus/Polaris Program)

NASA announced Thursday that it plans to study the possibility of using SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle to boost the aging Hubble Space Telescope into a higher orbit.

The federal agency has signed a "Space Act Agreement" with SpaceX to conduct a six-month study to determine the practicability of Dragon docking with the 32-year-old telescope and boosting it into a higher orbit. The study is not exclusive, meaning that other companies can propose similar concepts with alternative rockets and spacecraft.

The agreement comes after SpaceX and the Polaris Program—a series of private missions self-funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman—approached NASA about potential servicing missions including the Hubble Space Telescope. Isaacman is the first private citizen to command an orbital spaceflight, when he led a crew of four aboard SpaceX's Dragon in 2021 on the Inspiration4 mission. With Polaris he is seeking to push the boundaries of private space exploration outward. The first Polaris mission is scheduled for March 2022 on Dragon, and will fly to an altitude of 750 km while also conducting the first private spacewalks.

Enlarge / The crew of Polaris Dawn, from left: Scott Poteet, Jared Isaacman, Sarah Gillis, and Anna Menon, pose in front of SpaceX's Super Heavy rocket in South Texas. (credit: John Kraus/Polaris Program)

NASA announced Thursday that it plans to study the possibility of using SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle to boost the aging Hubble Space Telescope into a higher orbit.

The federal agency has signed a "Space Act Agreement" with SpaceX to conduct a six-month study to determine the practicability of Dragon docking with the 32-year-old telescope and boosting it into a higher orbit. The study is not exclusive, meaning that other companies can propose similar concepts with alternative rockets and spacecraft.

The agreement comes after SpaceX and the Polaris Program—a series of private missions self-funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman—approached NASA about potential servicing missions including the Hubble Space Telescope. Isaacman is the first private citizen to command an orbital spaceflight, when he led a crew of four aboard SpaceX's Dragon in 2021 on the Inspiration4 mission. With Polaris he is seeking to push the boundaries of private space exploration outward. The first Polaris mission is scheduled for March 2022 on Dragon, and will fly to an altitude of 750 km while also conducting the first private spacewalks.

Enlarge / MIT engineers built a battery-free, wireless underwater camera that could help scientists explore unknown regions of the ocean, track pollution, or monitor the effects of climate change. (credit: Adam Glanzman)

MIT engineers have built a wireless, battery-free underwater camera, capable of harvesting energy by itself while consuming very little power, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. The system can take color photos of remote submerged objects—even in dark settings— and convey the data wirelessly for real-time monitoring of underwater environments, aiding the discovery of new rare species or monitoring ocean currents, pollution, or commercial and military operations.

We already have various methods of taking underwater images, but according to the authors, "Most of the ocean and marine organisms have not been observed yet." That's partly because most existing methods require being tethered to ships, underwater drones, or power plants for both power and communication. Those methods that don't use tethering must incorporate battery power, which limits their lifetime. While it's possible in principle to harvest energy from ocean waves, underwater currents, or even sunlight, adding the necessary equipment to do so would result in a much bulkier and more expensive underwater camera.

So the MIT team set about developing a solution for a battery-free, wireless imaging method. The design goal was to minimize the hardware required as much as possible. Since they wanted to keep power consumption to a minimum,  for instance, the MIT team used cheap off-the-shelf imaging sensors. The trade-off is that such sensors only produce grayscale images. The team also needed to develop a low-power flash as well, since most underwater environments don't get much natural light.

Enlarge / MIT engineers built a battery-free, wireless underwater camera that could help scientists explore unknown regions of the ocean, track pollution, or monitor the effects of climate change. (credit: Adam Glanzman)

MIT engineers have built a wireless, battery-free underwater camera, capable of harvesting energy by itself while consuming very little power, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications. The system can take color photos of remote submerged objects—even in dark settings— and convey the data wirelessly for real-time monitoring of underwater environments, aiding the discovery of new rare species or monitoring ocean currents, pollution, or commercial and military operations.

We already have various methods of taking underwater images, but according to the authors, "Most of the ocean and marine organisms have not been observed yet." That's partly because most existing methods require being tethered to ships, underwater drones, or power plants for both power and communication. Those methods that don't use tethering must incorporate battery power, which limits their lifetime. While it's possible in principle to harvest energy from ocean waves, underwater currents, or even sunlight, adding the necessary equipment to do so would result in a much bulkier and more expensive underwater camera.

So the MIT team set about developing a solution for a battery-free, wireless imaging method. The design goal was to minimize the hardware required as much as possible. Since they wanted to keep power consumption to a minimum,  for instance, the MIT team used cheap off-the-shelf imaging sensors. The trade-off is that such sensors only produce grayscale images. The team also needed to develop a low-power flash as well, since most underwater environments don't get much natural light.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Hackers backed by the North Korean government are weaponizing well-known pieces of open source software in an ongoing campaign that has already succeeded in compromising "numerous" organizations in the media, defense and aerospace, and IT services industries, Microsoft said on Thursday.

ZINC—Microsoft's name for a threat actor group also called Lazarus, which is best known for conducting the devastating 2014 compromise of Sony Pictures Entertainment—has been lacing PuTTY and other legitimate open source applications with highly encrypted code that ultimately installs espionage malware.

The hackers then pose as job recruiters and connect with individuals of targeted organizations over LinkedIn. After developing a level of trust over a series of conversations and eventually moving them to the WhatsApp messenger, the hackers instruct the individuals to install the apps, which infect the employees' work environments.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Hackers backed by the North Korean government are weaponizing well-known pieces of open source software in an ongoing campaign that has already succeeded in compromising "numerous" organizations in the media, defense and aerospace, and IT services industries, Microsoft said on Thursday.

ZINC—Microsoft's name for a threat actor group also called Lazarus, which is best known for conducting the devastating 2014 compromise of Sony Pictures Entertainment—has been lacing PuTTY and other legitimate open source applications with highly encrypted code that ultimately installs espionage malware.

The hackers then pose as job recruiters and connect with individuals of targeted organizations over LinkedIn. After developing a level of trust over a series of conversations and eventually moving them to the WhatsApp messenger, the hackers instruct the individuals to install the apps, which infect the employees' work environments.

Enlarge / Intel arrives at a crucial sub-$300 price for its medium-end GPU option. But will that bear out as a worthwhile price compared to its performance? (credit: Intel)

Intel's highest-end graphics card lineup is approaching its retail launch, and that means we're getting more answers to crucial market questions of prices, launch dates, performance, and availability. Today, Intel answered more of those A700-series GPU questions, and they're paired with claims that every card in the Arc A700 series punches back at Nvidia's 18-month-old RTX 3060.

After announcing a $329 price for its A770 GPU earlier this week, Intel clarified that the company would launch three A700 series products on October 12: The aforementioned Arc A770 for $329, which sports 8GB of GDDR6 memory; an additional Arc A770 Limited Edition for $349, which jumps up to 16GB of GDDR6 at slightly higher memory bandwidth and otherwise sports otherwise identical specs; and the slightly weaker A750 Limited Edition for $289.

A770 (16GB model) and A750 specs breakdown. (credit: Intel)

If you missed the memo on that sub-$300 GPU when it was previously announced, the A750 LE is essentially a binned version of the A770's chipset with 87.5 percent of the shading units and ray tracing (RT) units turned on, along with an ever-so-slightly downclocked boost clock (2.05 GHz, compared to 2.1 GHz on both A770 models).