Month: June 2024

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft approaches the International Space Station on Thursday. (credit: NASA TV)

A little more than a day after launching into space, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft flew up to the International Space Station and docked with the orbiting laboratory on Thursday

The journey through space was not always easy. In the immediate hours after launch on Wednesday, the spacecraft was beset by two helium leaks in its propulsion system. Then, on Thursday, several of Starliner's spacecraft thrusters went offline for a time. Far more often than originally planned, spacecraft commander Butch Wilmore had to take manual control of Starliner while engineers on the ground worked on these and other issues.

However, at 1:34 pm ET on Thursday, Wilmore and the mission's other crew member, Suni Williams, successfully docked with the space station. A couple of hours later, they floated through the hatch, making a triumphant entry onto the station—and making history.

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft approaches the International Space Station on Thursday. (credit: NASA TV)

A little more than a day after launching into space, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft flew up to the International Space Station and docked with the orbiting laboratory on Thursday

The journey through space was not always easy. In the immediate hours after launch on Wednesday, the spacecraft was beset by two helium leaks in its propulsion system. Then, on Thursday, several of Starliner's spacecraft thrusters went offline for a time. Far more often than originally planned, spacecraft commander Butch Wilmore had to take manual control of Starliner while engineers on the ground worked on these and other issues.

However, at 1:34 pm ET on Thursday, Wilmore and the mission's other crew member, Suni Williams, successfully docked with the space station. A couple of hours later, they floated through the hatch, making a triumphant entry onto the station—and making history.

Enlarge / Not a simulation. Plasma pours over the aerosurfaces of SpaceX's Starship during reentry high over the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX demonstrated Thursday that its towering Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket might one day soon be recovered and reused in the manner Elon Musk has made his vision for the future of space exploration.

For the first time, both elements of the nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) rocket not only launched successfully from SpaceX's Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas, but also came back to Earth for controlled splashdowns at sea. This demonstration is a forerunner to future Starship test flights that will bring the booster, and eventually the upper stage, back to land for reuse again and again.

The two-stage rocket took off from Starbase at 7:50 am CDT (12:50 UTC) and headed east over the Gulf of Mexico with more than 15 million pounds of thrust, roughly twice the power of NASA's Saturn V rocket from the Apollo lunar program of the 1960s and 1970s.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino)

The Federal Communications Commission wants to verify that Internet service providers are strengthening their networks against attacks that take advantage of vulnerabilities in Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

The FCC today unanimously approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would require ISPs to prepare confidential reports "detail[ing] their progress and plans for implementing BGP security measures that utilize the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), a critical component of BGP security."

"Today, we begin a rulemaking to help make our Internet routing more secure," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said. "We propose that all providers of broadband Internet access service prepare and update confidential BGP security risk management plans. These plans would describe and attest to their efforts to follow existing best practices with respect to Route Origin Authorizations and Route Origin Validation using the Resource Public Key Infrastructure. In addition, we propose quarterly reporting for the largest providers to ensure we are making progress addressing this well-known vulnerability."

Enlarge / Light painting reveals a cloud of particulates on Airport Road, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (PM2.5 10-20 micrograms per cubic meter). (credit: Robin Price)

Light painting is a technique used in both art and science that involves taking long-exposure photographs while moving some kind of light source—a small flashlight, perhaps, or candles or glowsticks—to essentially trace an image with light. A UK collaboration of scientists and artists has combined light painting with low-cost air pollution sensors to visualize concentrations of particulate matter (PM) in select locations in India, Ethiopia, and Wales. The objective is to creatively highlight the health risks posed by air pollution, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Air pollution is the leading global environmental risk factor," said co-author Francis Pope, an environmental scientist at the University of Birmingham in the UK who spearheaded the Air of the Anthropocene project with artist Robin Price. "[The project] creates spaces and places for discussions about air pollution, using art as a proxy to communicate and create dialogues about the issues associated with air pollution. By painting with light to create impactful images, we provide people with an easy-to-understand way of comparing air pollution in different contexts—making something that was largely invisible visible."

Light painting has been around since 1889, when Étienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demeny, who were investigating the use of photography as a scientific tool to study biological motion, created the first known light painting called Pathological Walk From in Front. In 1914, Frank and Lillian Mollier Gilbreth tracked the motion of manufacturing and clerical workers using light painting techniques, and in 1935, Man Ray "signed" his Space Writing series with a penlight—a private joke that wasn't discovered until 74 years later by photographer/historian Ellen Carey in 2009.

Enlarge (credit: Boris Zhitkov | Moment)

The European Center for Digital Rights, known as Noyb, has filed complaints in 11 European countries to halt Meta's plan to start training vague new AI technologies on European Union-based Facebook and Instagram users' personal posts and pictures.

Meta's AI training data will also be collected from third parties and from using Meta's generative AI features and interacting with pages, the company has said. Additionally, Meta plans to collect information about people who aren't on Facebook or Instagram but are featured in users' posts or photos. The only exception from AI training is made for private messages sent between "friends and family," which will not be processed, Meta's blog said, but private messages sent to businesses and Meta are fair game. And any data collected for AI training could be shared with third parties.

"Unlike the already problematic situation of companies using certain (public) data to train a specific AI system (e.g. a chatbot), Meta's new privacy policy basically says that the company wants to take all public and non-public user data that it has collected since 2007 and use it for any undefined type of current and future 'artificial intelligence technology,'" Noyb alleged in a press release.

Enlarge / At least my son will be able to use my copy of Fallout: New Vegas to distract him from mourning... (credit: Getty Images)

A few weeks ago, we called some attention to the legal difficulty of passing on your digital Steam game library after you die. While Valve hasn't responded to a request for comment on the matter, PC gaming platform GOG tells Ars that it is ready and willing to help users transfer their accounts in the event of their death.

As long as they bring a court order, that is.

"In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable," GOG spokesperson Zuzanna Rybacka tells Ars. "However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it, taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we’d do our best to make it happen."