Month: July 2023

Enlarge / Artist's illustration showing the orbital tracks of the European Space Agency's Aeolus satellite. (credit: ESA/ATG medialab)

The European Space Agency deftly guided one of its satellites toward a fiery re-entry into Earth's atmosphere Friday, demonstrating a new method of post-mission disposal to ensure the spacecraft would not fall into any populated areas.

The Aeolus satellite was relatively modest in size and mass—about 1.1 metric tons with its fuel tank empty—but ESA hailed Friday's "assisted re-entry" as proof that the space agency takes the stewardship of space seriously.

When the Aeolus mission was conceived in the late 1990s, there were no guidelines for European satellites regarding space debris or the safety of their re-entry. Aeolus took nearly 20 years to get to the launch pad, operated in space for five years, and now regulations have changed. Future ESA satellites will need to be capable of a targeted re-entry, where rocket engines steer the spacecraft toward a specific patch of ocean or are designed to burn up from aerodynamic heating.

Enlarge / French physicist Gerard Liger-Belair studied CO₂ levels in 13 old champagne vintages in three different bottle sizes. (credit: Andy Roberts/Getty Images)

A large part of the pleasure of imbibing a glass of champagne comes from its effervescence: all those bubbles rising from the glass and ticking the nose and palate. If there's no fizz, there's no fun—and also less flavor and aromas to savor. A recent paper published in the journal ACS Omega found that the size of the champagne bottle is a key factor in determining when the wine inside will go flat.

As we've reported previously, champagne's effervescence arises from the nucleation of bubbles on the glass walls. Once they detach from their nucleation sites, the bubbles grow as they rise to the liquid surface, where they burst. This typically occurs within a couple of milliseconds, and the distinctive crackling sound is emitted when the bubbles rupture. The bubbles even "ring" at specific resonant frequencies, depending on their size, so it's possible to "hear" the size distribution of bubbles as they rise to the surface in a glass of champagne.

Prior studies have shown that when the bubbles in champagne burst, they produce droplets that release aromatic compounds believed to enhance the flavor. Larger bubbles enhance the release of aerosols into the air above the glass—bubbles on the order of 1.7 mm across at the surface. French physicist Gerard Liger-Belair of the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne is one of the foremost scientists studying many different aspects of champagne and has now turned his attention to exploring how long champagne can age in the bottle before the carbonation dissipates to the point where those all-important bubbles can no longer form.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Portland Press Herald )

Local and federal authorities have shut down what seems to be an illegal medical lab hidden in a California warehouse that contained nearly 1,000 laboratory mice, hundreds of unknown chemicals, refrigerators and freezers, vials of biohazardous materials, including blood, incubators, and at least 20 infectious agents, including SARS-CoV-2, HIV, and a herpes virus.

According to NBC News affiliate KSEE of Fresno, local authorities were first tipped off to the unlicensed facility when a local code enforcement officer noticed that a garden hose was illegally attached to the back of the building. That led city officials to obtain a search warrant to inspect the warehouse, which was supposed to only be used for storage.

According to court documents obtained by NBC News, city officials inspected the warehouse, located in Reedley, southeast of Fresno, on March 3. County health officials then inspected the facility on March 16. What they found reportedly shocked them.

Enlarge / The back of the iPhone 13. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple has announced an additional hoop developers must jump through to get their apps approved on its App Store. Soon, developers of apps that use certain APIs will have to clarify their reasons for using them when submitting those apps.

Apple is trying to close some fingerprinting loopholes here. The term "fingerprinting" in this context refers to various techniques for learning information about a device or its user and tracking them across multiple unrelated apps or websites.

It's something that Apple has been saying is not allowed in iPhone apps for a while, and the company introduced the controversial App Tracking Transparency initiative in 2021 to give users a choice in whether things like mobile ad networks (for example) could track them in this way.

Enlarge / The back of the iPhone 13. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple has announced an additional hoop developers must jump through to get their apps approved on its App Store. Soon, developers of apps that use certain APIs will have to clarify their reasons for using them when submitting those apps.

Apple is trying to close some fingerprinting loopholes here. The term "fingerprinting" in this context refers to various techniques for learning information about a device or its user and tracking them across multiple unrelated apps or websites.

It's something that Apple has been saying is not allowed in iPhone apps for a while, and the company introduced the controversial App Tracking Transparency initiative in 2021 to give users a choice in whether things like mobile ad networks (for example) could track them in this way.

Enlarge / A Google robot controlled by RT-2. (credit: Google)

On Friday, Google DeepMind announced Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2), a "first-of-its-kind" vision-language-action (VLA) model that uses data scraped from the Internet to enable better robotic control through plain language commands. The ultimate goal is to create general-purpose robots that can navigate human environments, similar to fictional robots like WALL-E or C-3PO.

When a human wants to learn a task, we often read and observe. In a similar way, RT-2 utilizes a large language model (the tech behind ChatGPT) that has been trained on text and images found online. RT-2 uses this information to recognize patterns and perform actions even if the robot hasn't been specifically trained to do those tasks—a concept called generalization.

For example, Google says that RT-2 can allow a robot to recognize and throw away trash without having been specifically trained to do so. It uses its understanding of what trash is and how it is usually disposed to guide its actions. RT-2 even sees discarded food packaging or banana peels as trash, despite the potential ambiguity.

Enlarge / A Google robot controlled by RT-2. (credit: Google)

On Friday, Google DeepMind announced Robotic Transformer 2 (RT-2), a "first-of-its-kind" vision-language-action (VLA) model that uses data scraped from the Internet to enable better robotic control through plain language commands. The ultimate goal is to create general-purpose robots that can navigate human environments, similar to fictional robots like WALL-E or C-3PO.

When a human wants to learn a task, we often read and observe. In a similar way, RT-2 utilizes a large language model (the tech behind ChatGPT) that has been trained on text and images found online. RT-2 uses this information to recognize patterns and perform actions even if the robot hasn't been specifically trained to do those tasks—a concept called generalization.

For example, Google says that RT-2 can allow a robot to recognize and throw away trash without having been specifically trained to do so. It uses its understanding of what trash is and how it is usually disposed to guide its actions. RT-2 even sees discarded food packaging or banana peels as trash, despite the potential ambiguity.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Reddit is campaigning to replace numerous longstanding moderators who were removed from their positions after engaging in API protests. Over the past week, a Reddit employee has posted to subreddits with ousted mods, asking for new volunteers. But in its search, the company has failed to address the intricacies involved in moderating distinct and, in some cases, well-known subreddits. And it doesn't look like the knowledge from the previous moderators is being passed down.

Redditors were enraged over suddenly high API access pricing, and the social media platform's subsequent responses to protests and feedback have beleaguered Reddit for weeks. A two-day blackout of over 8,000 subreddits, for example, shut Reddit down for three hours in June. Protestors complicated matters further with moves like suddenly making subreddits not-safe-for-work (NSFW), all about John Oliver, or focusing on some unhelpful tweak of its original topic (like r/malefashionadvice only allowing posts related to the stylings of the 18th century).

It's a tough job...

Reddit's response has included threatening to remove moderators who are engaging in protests to actually removing them. Recently, efforts to replace the departed volunteers who were booted or quit have picked up steam. A Reddit employee going by ModCodeofConduct (Reddit has refused to disclose the real names of admins representing the company on the platform) has posted to numerous subreddits over recent days, including r/IRLEasterEggs, r/donthelpjustfilm, r/ActLikeYouBelong, r/malefashionadvice, and r/AccidentalRenaissance.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Security researchers have unearthed a rare malware find: malicious Android apps that use optical character recognition to steal credentials displayed on phone screens.

The malware, dubbed CherryBlos by researchers from security firm Trend Micro, has been embedded into at least four Android apps available outside of Google Play, specifically on sites promoting money-making scams. One of the apps was available for close to a month on Google Play but didn’t contain the malicious CherryBlos payload. The researchers also discovered suspicious apps on Google Play that were created by the same developers, but they also didn’t contain the payload.

Advanced techniques

The apps took great care to conceal their malicious functionality. They used a paid version of commercial software known as Jiagubao to encrypt code and code strings to prevent analysis that can detect such functionality. They also featured techniques to ensure the app remained active on phones that had installed it. When users opened legitimate apps for Binance and other cryptocurrency services, CherryBlos overlaid windows that mimicked those of the legitimate apps. During withdrawals, CherryBlos replaced the wallet address the victim selected to receive the funds with an address controlled by the attacker.