Month: December 2022

Enlarge / A view of the aft end of the Soyuz spacecraft leaking what appears to be ammonia on Wednesday night. (credit: NASA TV)

A Russian spacewalk was canceled at the last minute on Wednesday night when a spacecraft attached to the International Space Station unexpectedly sprang a large leak.

Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin were dressed in spacesuits, with the airlock depressurized, when flight controllers told them to standby while the leak in a Soyuz spacecraft was investigated. The spacewalk was subsequently called off shortly before 10pm ET (03:00 UTC Thursday).

The leak appears to have originated in an external cooling loop located at the aft end of the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft. Public affairs officer Rob Navias, who was commentating on the spacewalk for NASA Television, characterized the spacecraft as leaking "fairly substantially." Video of the leak showed particles streaming continuously from the Soyuz, a rather remarkable sight. This was likely ammonia, which is used as a spacecraft coolant, although Russian officials have not confirmed this.

Enlarge (credit: John Timmer)

If your complete list of bicycle formats consists of road and mountain, then you may struggle to remember what a cruiser is. Think of a long, heavy frame with handlebars that sweep back in a wide curve, allowing the rider to perch nearly upright on a wide, comfy seat. Fat tires make for a cushy ride, often down a road that runs alongside a beach in a warm, sunny climate.

Based on its name and aesthetics, the Ride1Up Cafe Cruiser is meant to evoke those bikes. And it does a passable job with fat tires, sweeping handlebars, and an upright riding stance. But it also provides the pedal assist of a Class 3 e-bike, meaning it'll keep providing power until the bike hits 28 mph (45 km/hr). And that makes for a ride that's decidedly not a casual cruise.

The bike

The Cafe Cruiser comes in both step-over and step-through frames; we tested the step-over version, which weighed in at about 30 kg (65 lbs). Its heavy rack is integrated into the frame, and the front fork has suspension to smooth out some bumps. There are a couple of spots where the frame is thicker for apparently aesthetic reasons; beyond that, the bike's most distinctive feature is the fact that the battery drops out of the bottom of the frame rather than slotting into place from above. This makes it somewhat harder to get it back into place if you remove it, but it allows space to put a water bottle holder on top of that tube.

Enlarge (credit: Oppo)

This time of year is often weird tech concept season—companies show us gadgets that they've been tinkering with and may or may not sell. Chinese smartphone maker Oppo is getting started ahead of CES with an intriguing smart health tracker meant for the whole family. Like fitness trackers and smartwatches, Oppo's OHealth H1 family health monitor uses sensors to track various health stats. But unlike those wearables, the H1 prototype is meant to be held in your hand—or to the forehead, chest, or back—when taking readings.

Oppo shared a video today demonstrating this "concept prototype" as part of its fourth annual Inno Day event, where the company has previously shown confirmed products, like this year's Bluetooth audio system-on-a-chip, and its concepts. The event has included in-person attendance in the past, but this year’s event looks like it was just a video shared online Although only a concept, Oppo's calling the H1 the first product from its "smart healthcare sub-brand" launched this year, OHealth.

The H1 uses sensors and algorithms to provide ECG, heart rate, blood oxygen, and body temperature readings. It also claims to be able to track sleep, and through skin contact, Oppo says the H1 can perform heart and lung auscultation. Oppo said readings could be taken simultaneously or one at a time for better accuracy.

Enlarge / WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus looks on during a press conference at the World Health Organization's headquarters in Geneva, on December 14, 2022. (credit: Getty | Fabrice COFFRINI)

As the US appears to be heading into another dreaded winter wave of COVID-19 infections, the World Health Organization is looking further ahead—and finding hope for the end of the global health emergency.

In a press conference on Wednesday in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that discussion of the criteria for declaring the end of the pandemic would begin in January, when the agency's Emergency Committee will meet.

"We’re hopeful that at some point next year, we will be able to say that COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency," Tedros said.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Federal prosecutors on Wednesday charged six people for allegedly operating websites that launched millions of powerful distributed denial of service attacks on a wide array of victims on behalf of millions of paying customers.

The sites promoted themselves as booter or stressor services designed to test the bandwidth and performance of customers’ networks. Prosecutors said in court papers that the services were used to direct massive amounts of junk traffic at third-party websites and Internet connections customers wanted to take down or seriously constrain. Victims included educational institutions, government agencies, gaming platforms, and millions of individuals. Besides charging six defendants, prosecutors also seized 48 Internet domains associated with the service.

“These booter services allow anyone to launch cyberattacks that harm individual victims and compromise everyone’s ability to access the Internet,” Martin Estrada, US attorney for the Southern District of California, said in a statement. “This week’s sweeping law enforcement activity is a major step in our ongoing efforts to eradicate criminal conduct that threatens the internet’s infrastructure and our ability to function in a digital world.”

Enlarge / Ghostwriter understands what you type and can automatically write responses using OpenAI's GPT-3. (credit: Arvind Sanjeev / Ars Technica)

On Wednesday, a designer and engineer named Arvind Sanjeev revealed his process for creating Ghostwriter, a one-of-a-kind repurposed Brother typewriter that uses AI to chat with a person typing on the keyboard. The "ghost" inside the machine comes from OpenAI's GPT-3, a large language model that powers ChatGPT. The effect resembles a phantom conversing through the machine.

To create Ghostwriter, Sanjeev took apart an electric Brother AX-325 typewriter from the 1990s and reverse-engineered its keyboard signals, then fed them through an Arduino, a low-cost microcontroller that is popular with hobbyists. The Arduino then sends signals to a Raspberry Pi that acts as a network interface to OpenAI's GPT-3 API.

When GPT-3 responds, Ghostwriter noisily types the AI model's output onto paper automatically.

Enlarge / A couple of folks absolutely getting down to Rock Band 2 at that game's 2008 launch party at LA's Orpheum Theatre. (credit: Getty Images)

If you've ever wanted to achieve a five-star Expert rating for Dragonforce's "Through the Fire and Flames," now's the time to grab that track for Rock Band 3. Online stores, DLC, and services for that game and 14 others will shut down on January 24 as Epic Games consolidates its online offerings.

Most notable among the games Epic says have "out-of-date online services and servers" are five Rock Band titles: 1-3, The Beatles, and Green Day. Rock Band's servers have been online since 2007, sending more than 100 million playable versions of over 2,000 songs for people to play on various plastic instruments studded with brightly colored buttons. You'll still be able to play any songs you've downloaded for those titles but no longer be able to connect for new tunes. Those committed to Rock Band 4 can still keep playing online multiplayer, Epic notes.

Another cornerstone of a bygone era, Unreal will lose servers for many of its games. Epic notes that it intends to bring back online features for Unreal Tournament 3, but Gold, II, Tournament 2003 and 2004, and Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition will go dark after the January 24 date.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Back in the day, taxonomists had to characterize organisms based basically on how they looked. Molecular phylogeny changed that; once scientists could isolate and amplify DNA, they started classifying organisms based on their genetic sequences. But that still usually required that the organisms be cultured (and thus culturable) in a lab.

High-throughput sequencing technology relieved that constraint. Now researchers can basically throw a drop of pus, pee, or pond water into a DNA sequencer and find a host of previously unidentified microbes.

Yet, rare sequences (and the organisms they come from) are still rare, and thus still hard to find. Microbial eukaryotic predators are single cells with complex internal structures, and they’re among the rarest taxa of all. To find some, researchers enriched seawater samples with bacterial prey to stimulate the growth of protists that ate them. The growth in protists in turn stimulated the growth of predators that fed on them. Only then did the researchers run their metagenomic analysis. They found 10 new predator strains that they say form a new supergroup. They named it Provara (for devouring voracious protists).