176865467
submission
XXongo writes:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records. The assessment had emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show. The shift in its long-standing messaging about vaccines is a sign that it may be falling in line under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines. Meanwhile, researchers say that measles vaccination rates may be as low as 71% in younger children, well below the threshold needed for herd immunity.
175476951
submission
XXongo writes:
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok is calling the billionaire out for his spread of misinformation on X. The chatbot, now being featured on the X (formerly Twitter) platform, highlighted Musk after user Gary Koepnick asked who spreads the most misinformation on the social media platform.“Based on various analyses, social media sentiment, and reports, Elon Musk has been identified as one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X since he acquired the platform,” Grok replied.
172345091
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XXongo writes:
Nuclear power plants have historically been built at GW scale. Recently, however, there has been a new dawn seeing multiple projects to build Small Modular Reactors ("SMRs"), both funded by billionaires and by the U.S. Department of Energy. Recently one of the players farthest ahead in the development, NuScale Power, canceled their headline project, but many other projects continue. In a lengthy analysis, Michael Barnard thinks that's crazy, and attributes the drive toward small reactors to "a tangled web that includes Bill Gates, Silicon Valley, desperate coal towns, desperate nuclear towns, the inability of the USA to build big infrastructure, the US Department of Energy’s budget, magical thinking and more." Due to thermal inefficiencies, small reactors are more expensive per unit power generated, he points out, and the SMR projects ignore most of the field's history’s lessons about both the scale of reactors for commercial success and the conditions needed for success. They are relying on Wright’s Law, that each doubling of the number of manufactured items in production manufacturing would bring cost per item down by 20% to 27%, but Barnard points out that the number of reactors needed to achieve enough economy of scale in production to make the reactors make economic sense is unrealistically optimistic. He concludes that only government programs can meet the conditions for successful deployment of nuclear power.
161333160
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XXongo writes:
The Frontline series The Power of Big Oil looks at how the oil industry successfully set up a campaign to discredit climate science and targetting individual politicians to vote against measures to curb climate change. Former Republican senator Chuck Hagel reflects on his part in killing US ratification of the Kyoto climate treaty, after a vigorous campaign by big oil to mischaracterise the Kyoto protocol as a threat to jobs and the economy while falsely claiming that China and India could go on polluting to their heart’s content. The resolution effectively put a block on US ratification of any climate treaty ever since. A quarter of a century later, Hagel acknowledges that the vote was wrong, and blames the oil industry for malignly claiming the science of climate change was not proved when companies such as Exxon and Shell already knew otherwise from their own research. “What we now know about some of these large oil companies’ positions: they lied. And yes, I was misled. They had evidence in their own institutions that countered what they were saying publicly. I mean they, lied,” he told the documentary-makers.
159019799
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XXongo writes:
Astra is trying to make some of the smallest launch vehicles in history. But their most recent launch of their Rocket 3 vehicle had an unusual failure, where the second stage seemed to get stuck inside the booster stage. Hackaday analyzes the failure:
Astra’s Rocket 3 is unique in that its second stage looks nothing like the first. Rather than a sleek rocket, its design is more reminiscent of a satellite; with exposed tanks and a skeletal structure that would never survive flight through the dense lower atmosphere. Since this stage will be traveling through the wispy upper atmosphere where drag isn’t a concern, Astra decided to strip it down to the bare essentials to reduce its mass. The downside of this design is that the fragile upper stage must be covered until the rocket has gained considerable altitude. So rather than placing just the payload into a protective aerodynamic fairing, the entire second stage needs to be enclosed. The lower portion of the second stage is tucked into the hollow interstage, and an elongated fairing makes sure the payload and its ride to space aren’t exposed to supersonic airflow in the early phases of flight.
It was this design difference, of the second stage actually inside the fairing attached to the booster, that allowed the possibility of the very unusual failure.
(Presumably they will fix in in their next launch.)
151615509
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XXongo writes:
The Guardian tells the story of the Satoshi, the converted cruise ship that was supposed to be the libertarian paradise, homesteading the high seas off the coast of Panama, free from rules and regulations and (most of all) taxes, with an economy run on cryptocurrency. The ship was even named "Satoshi", after the pseudonym of the nearly-mythical elder who outlined the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.
So, what went wrong? Well, turns out that it wasn't quit so simple, and in some ways the "borderless seas" are actually among the most tightly regulated locations on Earth. Even selling the ship for scrap turned out to be hard...
Alternate source
131049318
submission
XXongo writes:
Although the problems with internet voting have been pointed out over and over again, with the arrival of COVID-19, the idea has again been brought up as a way to avoid the problems of in-person voting. If we can do banking by internet, why can't we do online voting?
But, voting by an app is still a really stupid idea. If you want the government to belong to whichever hacking group can exploit a zero-day vulnerability first, this is it.
And, as Kaleigh Rogers of fivethirtyeight points out:
"even if there was a completely secure system, there’s currently no way to have an online vote that is both anonymous and auditable. An anonymous vote protects against voter coercion, suppression, or vote selling. An auditable vote protects against any errors or breaches, because officials can conduct a recount. But that combination, which is possible with a paper ballot, isn’t yet possible online."
129923308
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XXongo writes:
Monitoring parolees released from prison by an app on their smartphone sounds like a good idea, right? The phone has facial recognition and biometric ID, and a GPS system that knows where it is. But what if the app doesn't work? In a story on Gizmodo, the apps being used, according to security experts who examined the code, the app’s coding is “sloppy” and “irresponsible” and its default privacy settings wildly invasive, asking for “excessive permissions” to access device data. And the app isn't even accurate on recognizing parolees, nor on knowing location, with one parolee noting that the app set off the high-pitched warning alarm and sent a notification to her parole officers telling him that she was not at home multiple times in the middle of the night, when she was in fact at home and in bed. And the device also serves as a covert surveillance bug, with built-in potential to covertly record ambient audio from the phone, even in standby mode-- a feature which is not even legal in many states. “But there’s nothing you can do,” according to one parolee. “If you don’t accept it, then you go back to prison. You’re considered their property. That’s how they see it.”
125624404
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XXongo writes:
According to a study from Brown University of the origin of 6.5 million tweets about climate and global warming, a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, disproportionately skeptical of climate science and action. The Brown University study wasn’t able to identify any individuals or groups behind the battalion of Twitter bots, nor ascertain the level of influence they have had on the climate debate.
117503088
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XXongo writes:
Sometimes it seems that all the space news focuses on Space-X, but another private rocket company, Rocket Lab, is also making history with their bargain-basement space launcher, the Electron. The Electron booster just completed its seventh launch, this time carrying a satellite to the highest orbit yet, 1000 km. The launch carried the Astro Digital "Corvus" satellite. At 5.7 million dollars per launch, the company is the first of many space start-ups competing for the small-satellite launch business, a market too small to be of interest to the major launch companies like Space-X and United Launch Alliance.
To lower costs further, Rocket Lab has announced its intention to make their booster reusable-- with plans to capture Electron’s first stage in mid-air by helicopter.
99916497
submission
XXongo writes:
According to a story in The Verge, NASA has told the Lunar Resource Prospector Mission team to cease work on developing the mission by the end of May. The proposed mission was in development to send a rover to the lunar pole in 2022, with the objective to drill into ice frozen in permanently shadowed craters. Use of such ice has been proposed as a resource that could be processd into rocket fuel, oxygen, and water for life support systems.
The cancellation apparently is partly due to the mission having been shifted from the Human Exploration directorate of NASA, which is excited by the possibility of lunar resources supporting exploration, to the Science Mission directorate, which does not consider lunar ice a high priority for science.
The cancellation of the mission has gotten some controversy from the lunar science community, with the members of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG) writing an open letter to new administrator Bridenstine protesting the cancellation.
