Month: July 2023

Enlarge / Artist's concept of the VIPER rover working in lunar darkness. (credit: NASA/Daniel Rutter)

The search for ice at the Moon’s poles has loomed large in the field of lunar science since an instrument on an Indian satellite discovered water molecules inside shadowed crater floors more than a decade ago. NASA is now assembling a golf cart-size rover to drive into the dark polar craters to search for ice deposits that could be used by future astronauts to make their own rocket propellant and breathable air.

“A large group of people have been working on this idea for 10-plus years,” said Anthony Colaprete, project scientist for NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission.

Earlier this year, engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston started building the rover’s chassis. In June, the space agency formally approved VIPER’s team to move into full-scale assembly and testing ahead of the rover’s scheduled launch in November 2024.

Enlarge / Khachatur Manukyan and colleagues at the University of Notre Dame used cutting-edge spectroscopic and imaging instruments to get a closer look at the inks, paper, and fibers that made Benjamin Franklin’s bills distinctive and hard to replicate. (credit: University of Notre Dame)

A papermaker in Massachusetts named Zenas Marshall Crane is traditionally credited with being the first to include tiny fibers in the paper pulp used to print currency in 1844. But scientists at the University of Notre Dame have found evidence that Benjamin Franklin was incorporating colored fibers into his own printed currency much earlier, among other findings, according to a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

We first reported on Franklin's ingenious currency innovations—most likely intended to foil counterfeiters (although this is disputed by at least one economist)—in 2021, when Notre Dame nuclear physicist Michael Wiescher gave a talk summarizing his group's early findings. The new paper, co-authored by Weischer, covers those earlier results along with the colored fiber evidence. As previously reported, the American colonies initially adopted the bartering system of the Native Americans, trading furs and strings of decorative shells known as wampum, as well as crops and imported manufactured items like nails. But the Boston Mint used Spanish silver between 1653 and 1686 for minting coins, adding a little copper or iron to increase their profits (a common practice).

The first paper money appeared in 1690 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony printed paper currency to pay soldiers to fight campaigns against the French in Canada. The other colonies soon followed suit, although there was no uniform system of value for any of the currency. To combat the inevitable counterfeiters, government printers sometimes made indentations in the cut of the bill, which would be matched to government records to redeem the bills for coins. But this method wasn't ideal since paper currency was prone to damage.

Enlarge / Bottles of MMS, the bleach product that Genesis II Church of Health and Healing was ordered to stop selling. (credit: Genesis II Church of Health and Healing)

A Florida family that allegedly formed a faux church and made over $1 million by falsely selling toxic, industrial bleach as a miracle cure for HIV, cancer, COVID-19, and other diseases is now standing trial in Miami.

Mark Grenon, 65, his sons Jonathan, 37, Joseph, 35, and Jordan, 29, and their quasi-religious church, Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, based in Bradenton, are all facing federal criminal charges from 2020 of conspiring to defraud the US and selling misbranded drugs. Their trial began Monday.

After the charges were filed in 2020, Jonathan and Jordan Grenon were arrested in Bradenton, but Mark and Joseph fled to Colombia, where there were arrested by local authorities and extradited to the US.

Enlarge (credit: Witthaya Prasongsin (Getty Images))

OpenAI has been testing its multimodal version of GPT-4 with image-recognition support prior to a planned wide release. However, public access is being curtailed due to concerns about its ability to potentially recognize specific individuals, according to a New York Times report on Tuesday.

When OpenAI announced GPT-4 earlier this year, the company highlighted the AI model's multimodal capabilities. This meant that the model could not only process and generate text but also analyze and interpret images, opening up a new dimension of interaction with the AI model.

Following the announcement, OpenAI took its image-processing abilities a step further in collaboration with a startup called Be My Eyes, which is developing an app to describe images to blind users, helping them interpret their surroundings and interact with the world more independently.

Enlarge / In March BrightDrop shipped the first 500 vans built at its factory in Canada. (credit: BrightDrop)

General Motors has idled production of some of its electric vehicles due to a battery shortage. BrightDrop—a GM startup brand that's building last-mile delivery vans for companies like FedEx and Verizon—has stopped building EVs at its plant in Ingersoll, Canada, due to a lack Ultium battery cells.

GM debuted BrightDrop and its delivery van during chairwoman Mary Barra's keynote address at CES in 2021. The van was developed in record time—just slightly quicker than the electric Hummer, and like that EV, it leverages GM's new Ultium batteries.

Production began later in 2021, at first being conducted under contract in Michigan with an unnamed company as GM refitted its CAMI plant in Ingersoll. CAMI started production in December 2022, and BrightDrop has years of orders to fulfill, but some of those customers will end up waiting longer due to a lack of batteries to power the electric vans.