Category: Tech

Welcome to Edition 7.36 of the Rocket Report! Well, after nine months, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are finally back on Earth, safe and sound. This brings to conclusion one of the stranger and more dramatic human spaceflight stories in years. We’re glad they’re finally home, soon to be reunited with their families. As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar. Summary of 2024 launch activity. In its annual launch report, released earlier this month, Bryce Tech analyzed the 259 orbital launches conducted last year. Among the major trends the analysts found were: Nearly 60 percent of all launches were conducted by US providers, Commercial providers accounted for about 70 percent of launches, and Small satellites, primarily for communications, represented the majority of all spacecraft launched at 97 percent. Read full article Comments

The Federal Communications Commission is making it easier for telcos to turn off old copper phone and DSL networks with four changes that relax requirements related to copper shutoffs. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr—who is also pushing a “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative to get rid of as many rules as possible—said in an announcement today that agency rules have prevented providers from upgrading to faster networks. “Outdated FCC rules have left Americans sitting in the slow lane for far too long,” Carr said. “Those FCC rules have forced providers to pour resources into maintaining aging and expensive copper line networks instead of investing in the modern, high-speed infrastructure that Americans want and deserve.” The key question for people using old copper service is whether they will ever get a big upgrade to fiber lines for phone and Internet access or if they’ll have to make do with wireless replacements that vary greatly in quality and speed. As we previously reported, AT&T is aiming to eliminate copper phone and DSL lines from its 21-state wireline network but will not deploy fiber in the more sparsely populated half of that territory. Read full article Comments

That control is starting to fray as Mr. Johnson, a longevity guru known for performing experiments on his body, faces a backlash over the agreements.

“A.I. companies are slowly and haltingly learning to speak the language of Tweety McTreason.”

Fuelled by $15bn in financing, Northvolt was supposed to be Europe’s great battery success story — a homegrown champion capable of competing with Asian and American giants.   So when Northvolt filed for bankruptcy last week, after months of job cuts, restructuring, and multiple failed attempts to raise more money, it dealt a massive blow to Europe’s ambitions to ramp up domestic production of lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from EVs to smartphones.  In the wake of Northvolt’s precipitous fall from grace, everyone from politicians and investors to the company’s own employees has voiced their opinions on what went wrong. Among… This story continues at The Next Web

The United States has long understood a simple truth: war is won not by size alone, but by speed and creativity. Indeed, innovation has always been crucial in conflict. Armour made knights safe until the crossbow came along. High walls protected cities until cannons emerged. Trenches were made obsolete by fast-moving mechanised forces. The lesson: a military that cannot innovate is one that falls behind. Yet Europe remains stuck with an outdated model of defence procurement – one that favours a handful of bloated contractors doing the same old thing over the fresh ideas of startups and entrepreneurs. Against a… This story continues at The Next Web

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico—For decades, America’s big defense contractors have known they can count on a steady flow of business from the Pentagon. You win some, and you lose some. But don’t fret. Inevitably, there’s a new opportunity to get money from the world’s largest military. This paradigm is shifting with the launch of a wave of startups eager to deliver software, missiles, drones, satellites, and other services. It’s no surprise that the US military is often the core market for these companies. Since its establishment more than five years ago, the Space Force inherited many of the old ways of doing business ensconced at the Pentagon since World War II. Over the last half-century, numerous defense contractors merged and acquired one another, often escaping scrutiny by promising efficiencies that will result in savings for US taxpayers. Those efficiencies rarely materialized. Read full article Comments

Things have gotten a little wild in the Chicago suburb of Orland Park, Illinois, where local cops accused a former cop of impersonating a current cop on Facebook. The department also noted that a top police official had “a glitter bomb sent to him anonymously at the Police Department” and “was contacted by a suicide prevention hotline as a result of a spoofed call.” So, in a bit of a freak-out over this alleged harassment and impersonation, the Orland Park police investigated and eventually sought charges against the former cop—who said that all he had done was to create a parodic Facebook page critiquing the current departmental leadership. The whole case was eventually tossed by a judge, who said that the Facebook page wasn’t criminal, and now the former cop is suing the current cops for going after him. Read full article Comments

Apple was slower than most Big Tech firms to jump on the generative AI hype train, but it finally got there with the release of Apple Intelligence. The first components of Apple’s AI rolled out last year, but it’s going to take a bit longer for one of the most hotly anticipated features. After announcing that the improved Siri was delayed until 2026, Apple has reportedly begun an uncharacteristic reorganization of its executive ranks. The new report from Bloomberg claims that Apple hopes to get its AI-backed Siri efforts back on track after months of delays. The updated assistant is supposed to leverage on-device data to improve personal context to make interactions more natural and work across apps. CEO Tim Cook has apparently become dissatisfied with John Giannandrea, the company’s AI head. Apple leadership discussed the lagging Siri AI features at length during a recent summit, and the result is that Giannandrea will no longer be overseeing Siri development. In the coming days, Apple is expected to tell employees that Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell will be stepping in to take over development of the next-gen Siri. This will remove Apple’s troubled virtual assistant completely from Giannandrea’s oversight, leaving him to work on AI research and testing initiatives. Apple’s Vision Products Group, which is responsible for developing the company’s VR headsets, will be managed by Rockwell deputy Paul Meade going forward. Read full article Comments

Robert Wickens was one of motorsport’s rising stars when his life was permanently altered in a crash that paralyzed him from the chest down in 2018. Ever since, Wickens has said that his goal is to return to compete in the sport at the top level, and that looks set to happen early next month in Long Beach, California, following a successful test of his hand control-equipped Corvette GT3.R race car earlier this week. The day-and-a-half test at Sebring in Florida wasn’t Wickens’ first time in a race car since his crash. In 2021 he tested a less-powerful front-wheel drive Hyundai Veloster N TCR car and competed in the Michelin Pilot Challenge series for Bryan Herta Autosport, winning the championship in 2023 with his teammate Harry Gottsacker in the newer Elantra N TCR car. And last year, we bumped into him in Portland, Oregon, ahead of his test in the Formula E Gen3 Evo car. Read full article Comments

A Norwegian man said he was horrified to discover that ChatGPT outputs had falsely accused him of murdering his own children. According to a complaint filed Thursday by European Union digital rights advocates Noyb, Arve Hjalmar Holmen decided to see what information ChatGPT might provide if a user searched his name. He was shocked when ChatGPT responded with outputs falsely claiming that he was sentenced to 21 years in prison as “a convicted criminal who murdered two of his children and attempted to murder his third son,” a Noyb press release said. ChatGPT’s “made-up horror story” not only hallucinated events that never happened, but it also mixed “clearly identifiable personal data”—such as the actual number and gender of Holmen’s children and the name of his hometown—with the “fake information,” Noyb’s press release said. Read full article Comments

Last year, we reported on an exciting hint of new physics in the first data analysis results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI)—namely that the dark energy, rather than being constant, might vary over time. Granted, those hints were still below the necessary threshold to claim discovery and hence fell under the rubric of “huge, if true.” But now we have more data from DESI, combined with other datasets, and those hints have gotten significantly stronger—so much so that Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki of the University of Texas at Dallas, who co-chairs one of the DESI working groups, said that “we are getting to the point of no return” for confirming dynamical dark energy. Ishak-Boushaki and several other DESI team members presented their results at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit today in Anaheim, California. Several relevant papers have also been posted to the physics arXiv. Einstein’s cosmological constant (lambda) implied the existence of a repulsive form of gravity. (For a more in-depth discussion of the history of the cosmological constant and its significance for dark energy, see our 2024 story.) Quantum physics holds that even the emptiest vacuum is teeming with energy in the form of “virtual” particles that wink in and out of existence, flying apart and coming together in an intricate quantum dance. This roiling sea of virtual particles could give rise to dark energy, giving the Universe a little extra push so that it can continue accelerating. The problem is that the quantum vacuum contains too much energy: roughly 10120 times too much. Read full article Comments

Steve Davis, a longtime Musk loyalist, is effectively the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency. Mr. Musk has likened him to chemotherapy.

With the compliance deadline for the European Accessibility Act (EAA) fast approaching, companies are urgently trying to ensure their websites meet the requirements of the EU directive.  One appealing solution is accessibility widgets — small add-ons with features like text resizing, contrast adjustments, and text-to-speech functions. However, while these widgets promise fast and inexpensive compliance, they often fail to address the real issues of accessibility. In fact, they can even make websites harder for people with disabilities to navigate.  Here’s why relying on widgets is a short-sighted solution and what web developers should focus on instead to create truly accessible… This story continues at The Next Web