Month: June 2023

Enlarge / A photo taken of the first space-borne prototype from Caltech's Space Solar Power Project. (credit: SSPP)

As far as legislative moments go, the passage of a minor amendment to an innocuous US House resolution on Wednesday was not exactly groundbreaking. But for space exploration enthusiasts, the amendment offered by US Rep. Kevin Mullin, D-Calif., was kind of a big deal.

That's because, for the first time since the 1970s, the idea of space-based solar power has been addressed legislatively by the US Congress.

"Although the technology to gather solar energy in space and send it to the surface as electricity is not yet commercially viable at scale, we already know from early research that it is possible," Mullin said during a meeting of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee on Wednesday.

Enlarge / An Egyptian drinking vessel in the shape of Bes head contained traces of Syrian rue and blue water lily, among other compounds. (credit: Tampa Museum of Art, Florida)

An ancient Egyptian vase in the shape of the deity Bes showed traces of chemical plant compounds known to produce hallucinations, according to a recent preprint posted to Research Square. The authors suggest that members of the cult of Bes may have consumed a special cocktail containing the compounds to induce altered states of consciousness.

There is ample evidence that humans in many cultures throughout history used various hallucinogenic substances in religious ceremonies or shamanic rituals. That includes not just ancient Egypt but also ancient Greek, Vedic, Maya, Inca, and Aztec cultures. The Urarina people who live in the Peruvian Amazon Basin still use a psychoactive brew called ayahuasca in their rituals, and Westerners seeking their own brand of enlightenment have also been known to participate.

Lacing the beer served at their feasts with hallucinogens may have helped an ancient Peruvian people known as the Wari forge political alliances and expand their empire, according to a 2022 study. As previously reported, the use of hallucinogens, particularly a substance derived from the seeds of the vilca tree, was common in the region during the so-called Middle Horizon period, when the Wari empire thrived.

Enlarge / Xfinity's Flex box is likely the model for the Xumo Box, a streaming device to be sold at Walmart later this year. (credit: Xfinity/Comcast/Charter)

There are an overwhelming number of choices right now for watching streaming media on your TV. Most TVs have a system built in, often Roku, Google, or Samsung. Standalone boxes from Roku, Apple, Google, and Amazon run the third-party market, and smaller vendors offer remarkably cheap Android-based boxes online and at discount retailers.

But—wait—that's not all. Now Comcast and Charter, the largest and second-largest cable companies in the US, have their own HDMI-box offering. If you've always wanted a box that is stuffed full of "free" ad-stuffed, pseudo-streaming channels, doesn't have the app stores or mirroring capabilities of the major brands, and helps major cable companies regain market position and recoup revenue lost to cord-cutters like you, say hello to the Xumo Box.

Xumo is the name of Comcast's free streaming service, purchased by the company in 2020. It's the kind that looks like a cable channel guide and has an endless loop of pre-selected game shows, reality TV, crime procedurals, and other ready-to-license material akin to Pluto and Freevee. Xumo is a big part of Flex, the streaming box Comcast's Xfinity service offers to customers who don't want a traditional TV plan.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Thierry Monasse)

Body mass index has for decades been used as a shorthand for assessing body fat and weight-related health risks. But for about just as long, critics have noted the simple calculation is laden with problems; BMI doesn’t actually measure fat mass, account for its distribution, or how those differ by age, gender, ethnicity, race, and how those differences affect health risks. Calculations and cutoffs are largely based on past generations of non-Hispanic white people. And BMI classifications mislead people on their individual risks of disease and death, and can lead to substandard care for eating disorders.

Now, it seems the hefty criticism has finally reached a critical mass. During the annual meeting of the American Medical Association (AMA) this week in Chicago, physicians and medical students voted to adopt a strongly worded policy acknowledging the calculation's "significant limitations" and "historical harms," including "racist exclusion." While the massive medical group acknowledged that BMI remains useful for population-level trends and associations, the policy called for doctors to become familiar with the calculation's problems and explore alternative measurements for diagnosing obesity and assessing health risks.

"There are numerous concerns with the way BMI has been used to measure body fat and diagnose obesity, yet some physicians find it to be a helpful measure in certain scenarios," AMA Immediate Past President Jack Resneck, Jr., said in a statement.  "It is important for physicians to understand the benefits and limitations of using BMI in clinical settings to determine the best care for their patients."

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Tension and confusion have made the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI "awkward," people familiar with the matter revealed in a Wall Street Journal report today.

Not only has this tension and confusion extended to Microsoft's internal AI team—which apparently is dealing with budget cuts and limited access to OpenAI technology—but sources said it also clouded Microsoft's controversial rollout of AI-powered Bing search last February. At that time, Bing was found to be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks revealing company secrets and providing sometimes inaccurate and truly unhinged responses to user prompts.

According to WSJ, OpenAI warned Microsoft "about the perils of rushing to integrate OpenAI’s technology without training it more" and "suggested Microsoft move slower on integrating its AI technology with Bing." A top concern for OpenAI was that Bing's chatbot, Sydney, might give inaccurate or unhinged responses, but this early warning seemingly was easily ignored by Microsoft.

Enlarge / The Surface Pro 8's replaceable SSD. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Microsoft offers first-party service manuals for several generations' worth of Surface hardware, in keeping with a commitment to improve its repairability and sustainability efforts. Today, Microsoft is taking the next step, listing dozens of replacement parts for Surface tablets, laptops, and all-in-ones on the Microsoft Store.

The screens, kickstands, batteries, keyboards, camera modules, and other odds and ends are available for the Surface Pro 8, 9, and X; Surface Laptops 2 through 5 plus the Go 2 and the Studio; and the Studio and Studio 2+ all-in-one desktops. Most of the major components are pretty expensive—the display for a Surface Studio 2+ is $1,750 all by itself—but they're cheaper than buying a new device, you won't have to pay for labor costs, and you can be sure you're getting genuine first-party components.

"When purchasing a replacement component, you will receive the part and relevant collateral components (such as screws if applicable)," wrote Microsoft VP Tim McGuiggan. "Tools needed for the repair are sold separately through iFixit. It is essential to follow the instructions in the applicable Microsoft Service Guide or article."

Enlarge / IBM's Eagle processor has reached Rev3, which means lower noise qubits. (credit: IBM)

Today's quantum processors are error-prone. While the probabilities are small—less than 1 percent in many cases—each operation we perform on each qubit, including basic things like reading its state, has a significant error rate. If we try an operation that needs a lot of qubits, or a lot of operations on a smaller number of qubits, then errors become inevitable.

Long term, the plan is to solve that using error-corrected qubits. But these will require multiple high-quality qubits for every bit of information, meaning we'll need thousands of qubits that are better than anything we can currently make. Given that we probably won't reach that point until the next decade at the earliest, it raises the question of whether quantum computers can do anything interesting in the meantime.

In a publication in today's Nature, IBM researchers make a strong case for the answer to that being yes. Using a technique termed "error mitigation," they managed to overcome the problems with today's qubits and produce an accurate result despite the noise in the system. And they did so in a way that clearly outperformed similar calculations on classical computers.