Lifeboat Foundation

Each Monday I pick out the northern hemisphere’s celestial highlights (mid-northern latitudes) for the week ahead, but be sure to.

The celestial highlights for the week ahead include a beautiful conjunction between two iconic planets in the solar system.

With new tools like the James Webb Space Telescope, we’re discovering more exoplanets than ever and even peering into their atmospheres. Now, NASA is asking for the public’s help in learning more about some of the exoplanets that have already been detected in a citizen science program called Exoplanet Watch.

“With Exoplanet Watch you can learn how to observe exoplanets and do data analysis using software that actual NASA scientists use,” said Rob Zellem, the creator of Exoplanet Watch and an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a statement. “We’re excited to show more people how exoplanet science is really done.”

The Exoplanet Watch project has two parts, one involving observing for those who have access to a telescope, and one involving identifying exoplanets in existing data. Even if you don’t have access to equipment other than a computer or smartphone, you can still help in learning about exoplanets by requesting access to data collected by robotic telescopes and assisting with data analysis. That’s needed because observing exoplanets passing in front of their host stars — in events called transits — is only half of the challenge of finding a new planet. These transits result in dips in the star’s brightness, but these dips are very small at typically less than 1% of the star’s brightness.

The AI-powered cuddling robots could provide therapy for future astronauts.

Japan is seeking to one day launch adorable robotic seals called Paros into space, according to an article by the South China Morning Post (SCMP)

The company has already undertaken a two-week simulation of a Mars mission at the U.S.-based Mars Desert Research Station, operated by the Mars Society in Utah.

Continue reading “Researchers test effects of baby seal robots on potential Mars dwellers” »

As Kaifu Lee, a keen observer of AI development in China has put it, “we’re now in the age of AI implementation.” While the West, the U.S. and Canada in particular, will remain ahead in AI research, those Western advances are quickly adopted in China where the massive market, a surfeit of young engineers, government support and a cutthroat entrepreneurial culture are driving industrial innovation in AI.

“The digital and real economies are accelerating their integration,” said Baidu’s Chief Technology Officer, Haifeng Wang, who is also Head of Baidu Research.

China’s 14th Five-Year Plan and Vision 2030 both place a strong focus on the development of the digital economy, seeing this sector as a source of tremendous untapped innovative power and space for growth.

Human beings are tiny creatures compared to the 92 billion light-year wide observable Universe. How can we comprehend such large scales?

Anyone who has visited the small island of Venice, full of its romantic canals and pedestrian paths with abrupt dead ends aplenty, knows that distance does not always go hand in hand with navigational ease. Fifteen years ago, NASA performed one of its most complex navigational routes to reach the Solar System’s smallest planet: Mercury. The MESSENGER mission made its first flyby of Mercury 15 years ago today, January 14, 2008, with two more flybys of the planet after, with NASA finally inserting it into orbit on April 4, 2011.

Between its launch on April 3, 2004, at Cape Canaveral and its orbital insertion in 2011, MESSENGER had a total of six flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury. However, these weren’t just passive flybys; they were gravitational assists. Sean Solomon, the principal investigator of the MESSENGER mission and former director / current adjunct senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, tells Inverse that the challenge isn’t so much getting to Mercury, but getting into orbit.

“By celestial mechanics, if you send a spacecraft in towards the Sun and gain speed from the gravitational well of the Sun without slowing down en route, the speed is about 10 km/s,” Solomon explains. “That’s too fast to do an orbital insertion with a propulsive burn using any conventional propulsion system that you can carry.”

This flaw, which has been identified that affects the ksmbd NTLMv2 authentication in the Linux kernel, is known to quickly cause the operating system on Linux-based computers to crash. Namjae Jeon is the developer of KSMBD, which is an open-source In-kernel CIFS/SMB3 server designed for the Linux Kernel. It is an implementation of the SMB/CIFS protocol in the kernel space that allows for the sharing of IPC services and files over a network.

In order to take advantage of the vulnerability, you will need to transmit corrupted packets to the server, personal computer, tablet, or smartphone that you are targeting. The attack causes what is known as “a memory overflow flaw in ksmbd decodentlmssp auth blob,” which states that nt len may be less than CIFS ENCPWD SIZE in some circumstances. Because of this, the blen parameter that is sent to ksmbd authntlmv2, which runs memcpy using blen on memory that was allocated by kmalloc(blen + CIFS CRYPTO KEY SIZE), is now negative. It is important to take note that the CIFS ENCPWD SIZE value is 16, and the CIFS CRYPTO KEY SIZE value is 8. As the heap overflow happens when blen is in the range [-8,-1], we think that the only possible outcome of this problem is a remote denial of service and not a privilege escalation or a remote code execution.

Continue reading “Critical zero day vulnerability in Linux Kernel Allows DoS Attack” »

The Butterfly Nebula is really “a tempestuous fire-sneezing dragon, with eyes that project ultraviolet light,” according to astronomer Bruce Balick.

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The UK government is supporting projects to put solar panels in space and beam energy back to Earth.