Category Archives: Singularity

Security News Jay Fitzgerald October 04, 2022, 10:45 AM EDT

From Sophoss X-Ops To Blackcloaks Honeypot offering, firms are providing more proactive intelligence offerings to combat increasing cyberthreats.

For years, cybersecurity was seen as a mostly defensive operation to keep bad actors at bay, shoring up digital fortifications across a number of proven or potential attack vectors.

But cybersecurity companies, both big and small, are increasingly introducing new intelligence offerings as ways to combat cyberattacks, proactively trying to identify potential bad actors and their tactics before they unleash sometimes devastating attacks on organizations.

Some of the intelligence offering include the use of AI to sift through data and provide risk analytics to customers. Some include actual analysts diving into the dark web to find and assess risks.

Others offering provide a combination of AI and human intelligence capabilities.

Meanwhile, cybersecurity companies are also establishing new internal intelligence and general research units to enhance intelligence gathering and product development.

As part of CRNs Cybersecurity Week 2022, heres look at 10 intelligence hot tools and services offered by cybersecurity companies, from both large firms and startups.

* Trellixs Advanced Research Center

* Sophos X-Ops

* SentinelOnes Singularity Vulnerability Mapping

* Cyberints Argos Edge

* BlackCloaks Honeypot deception trap

* Cybersixgills Dynamic Vulnerability Exploit (DVE) Intelligence

* Securonix: Identity Analytics and Intelligence

* CrowdStrikes suite of threat intelligence products

* Nisos: Managed Intelligence

Jay Fitzgerald is a senior editor covering cybersecurity for CRN.Jay previously freelanced for the Boston Globe, Boston Business Journal, Boston magazine, Banker & Tradesman, MassterList.com, Harvard Business Schools Working Knowledge, the National Bureau of Economic Research and other entities. He can be reached at jfitzgerald@thechannelcompany.com.

Continue reading here:

10 Hot Cyber Threat Intelligence Tools And Services In 2022 - CRN

(Photo courtesy of Game Rant) Nintendo has come out with its upcoming slate of offerings.

Tanner HumeConnector Editor

Nintendo Direct has once again graced the gaming landscape with announcements, news, and trailers for upcoming titles. A lot of things were revealed at Septembers most recent Direct, and they all need to be looked at. So without further ado, lets find out what was announced.

Farming Games: There were way too many farming games announced at direct. Seriously, there did not need to be that many. Sure, its nice to have one or two be announced. Five, however, may have been a bit much. The decision to announce so many releases from this genre, instead of a new Mario Kart or multiplayer Mario title is one of the more disappointing aspects of this Direct presentation. The highlights of the bunch are Harvestella and Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life. Harvestella may not seem like it necessarily needs to be a farming game, but regardless, the trailer was impressive, and the game has a lot of promise. Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life also looks like it could be quite the interesting experience.

Kirbys Return to Dream Land Deluxe: This popular Nintendo Wii title is now being remastered, and for good reason it is one of the better Kirby games to have come out. For fans of the franchise, this is a major win and one that brings with it a chance to re-live the game with the possibility of brand-new features. A cool addition to the upcoming remastered version is a previously absent online mode, where gamers can play this epic journey together. This also adds in some cool mini-games that will be fun for everyone.

Pikmin 4: After years of rumblings and fan speculation, Pikmin 4 is finally being released. It has been nearly 10 years since the release of the last Pikmin title, with the third installment being released back in 2013. For Pikmin lovers, this news is paradise. The only real downside to the announcement is the lack of substantive information. They did not give any details about the game, nor what it would feature. Nevertheless, this game will surely be a pandoras box of surprises.

Bayonetta 3: Do you ever want to hop onto a game and complete various tasks to save the world? Well, Bayonetta 3 is for you. Coming out in October, this game seems to be very much action-packed and filled to the brim with adventure and discovery. Can you defeat Singularity, or will you fail under pressure at the daunting task? Buy the game next month, and find out for yourself.

N64 Games: Nintendo is bringing a batch of classic Nintendo 64 games to Nintendo Switch Online. The titles include Pokmon Stadium and Goldeneye 007, which were widely loved by many back in the 90s and early 2000s. For the new generation of gamers, this is the chance to explore what these games were and how they earned their status. Yes, they even feature online play, which is a major bonus.

Final Fantasy VII Reunion: Revisiting the classic PSP game, Final Fantasy VII Reunion brings with it a renewed sense to play and enjoy the games features and epic quests it bares with it. Out in December, get your hands on a copy of this epic part of the saga.

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: The main event of Nintendo Direct, Tears of the Kingdom will certainly breathe new life into the Zelda franchise, with a whole new adventure and more tasks for Link to conquer. He certainly wont be letting Ganon get in his way this time. The game will be released to the Switch in May of 2023.

No matter what kinds of games youre into, this Nintendo Direct surely brought some good news, with plenty of titles to look forward to across the board.

Continue reading here:

Nintendo comes out strong with its offering of upcoming titles - The UML Connector

These days there is much talk about the metaverse, a world of virtual reality on the internet. Facebook even changed its corporate name to Meta to stake its claim to this concept. How well will this futuristic technology blend with basic human nature?

Successful technological innovations have almost always been built on the strong foundation of fundamental human nature. For example, smartphones address one of our core human needs: the need to communicate with others. While e-commerce was a technological revolution, its success depended heavily on generating enough trust, the core human factor in any commercial transaction, in online platforms. All major e-com players had to introduce several innovative features to their product design for buyers to trust the deals on offer. There are also times when technological innovations unearth latent human needs and make a big business out of them. Evolutionarily, humans have mostly interacted only with people they are close to, both physically and emotionally. These are their strong ties. There was little interaction with ones weak ties, such as acquaintances and those with whom one only shares broad common backgrounds. In 1973, Professor Mark S. Granovetter, then at Johns Hopkins University, published his paper, Strength of Weak Ties, in the American Journal of Sociology. In it, Granovetter reminded the world of frequent instances where ones interactions with weak ties could be more beneficial than those strong ties. But the larger world really understood this latent power of ones weak ties only with the arrival of social media. Social media companies established the fact that interactions with weak ties can have huge business potential. It is in this context that one should evaluate the success potential of the metaverse.

The metaverse is an online 3D virtual space that connects users, who can adopt various incarnations or avatars, in all aspects of their digital lives. The metaverse will allow users to work, meet, play and socialize together in these 3D spaces. Clearly demarcated from the real world, this is a virtual world where the adopted avatars of people might differ from their real-world personalities.

The metaverse is all about altered reality. Are humans keen to get out of the context they live in and stay in an alternate world? Are humans comfortable being someone else? Answers to these questions will determine whether Big Tech firms that are working to develop the hardware and software necessary for people to spend significant time and money in the metaverse will succeed or not.

The Hindu religion has always accepted that an entity can have multiple avatars. In fact, multiple avatars of the same deity are an established phenomenon in Hinduism. But with the arrival of Abrahamic faiths, the concept of divinity became strictly singular. So it was not surprising that even in interpreting the personality of an individual, singularity became the norm. Traditional theories of human behaviour have typically considered the human personality to be singular. Any trace of multiplicity in ones behaviour, more so if contradictory, was portrayed as a sign of duplicity. So most individuals took care to show only one consistent avatar to the outside world.

In standard economic models too, an individuals identity and preferences were considered fixed. It was George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton in their article Economics and Identity published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics who gave credence to the concept of an individuals multiple identities. They contended that a person chooses various identities in varied contexts, this identity choice being one of the most significant economic decisions an individual makes. American developmental psychologist Howard Gardner too lent his voice to new conversations around the multiplicity of human nature. He put forward the theory that human intelligence is not a single variable, but a combination of multiple intelligences of varying proficiency.

Especially strong support for the existence of multiplicity in human nature comes from anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow in their recent book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. In this book, they write about the concept of seasonal duality. Various human tribes across the world jump back and forth, over the course of the year, between distinctly opposite behaviours. In some cases, people actually adopt different names in summer and winter, literally becoming someone else during the course of the year. Many of these societies have two social structures: one in summer and one in winter, with two distinct sets of law.

For example, consider the Inuit community. In summer, they disperse into bands of 20-30 people under the leadership of a single male leader. During this period, property is possessively marked out and patriarchs exercise tyrannical power over their kin. But in the long winter months of relative hardship, there is a dramatic reversal. Inuits gather together as a larger group, and the virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevails. Wealth is shared, even husbands and wives, among partners.

So, the ability to consciously alternate between contrasting modes of life is an integral part of human nature, and has been so ever since the species hunter-gatherer days. This human nature of regular oscillations between distinctly different patterns of behaviour bodes well for modern-day investors in the metaverse. It is now for strategic thinkers and designers who are working on metaverse projects to take advantage of this aspect of our inherent human nature.

Biju Dominic is chief evangelist, Fractal Analytics, and chairman, FinalMile Consulting.

Subscribe to Mint Newsletters

* Enter a valid email

* Thank you for subscribing to our newsletter.

Visit link:

The metaverses evolutionary roots could aid its success | Mint - Mint

Big tech is eager to get us excited about the coming of the metaverse, but todays virtual reality hardware is a long way from meeting their ambitious goals. One of the biggest challenges is building better displays with far more pixels per inch, but experts say new materials and designs are on the way.

Silicon Valley is betting billions of dollars that the internet is about to undergo its biggest shift since the advent of the smartphone. Soon, the thinking goes, most people will be accessing the web via wearable headsets that transport us into virtual worlds rather than by tapping on a touchscreen.

Today, though, virtual and augmented reality are still fairly rudimentary. While companies like Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Magic Leap are already selling virtual and augmented reality headsets, they have found limited use cases so far, and the experiences they offer still fall well short of the high-definition standards we have come to expect from digital entertainment.

One of the biggest limitations is current display technology. In a VR headset, screens sit just a few centimeters in front of our eyes, so they need to pack a huge number of pixels into a very small space to approach the definition you might expect from the latest 4K TV.

Thats impossible with todays displays, but in a perspective published last week in Science, researchers from Samsung and Stanford University say that emerging technologies could soon get us close to the theoretical limit of pixel density, ushering in powerful new VR headsets.

Efforts to boost the performance of displays is complicated by the fact that this directly competes with another crucial goal: making them smaller, cheaper, and more energy-efficient. Todays devices are bulky and unwieldy, limiting the amount of time they can be worn and the context in which they can be used.

A major reason why headsets are so large today is the array of optical elements they feature and the need to keep sufficient space between them and the displays to focus light properly. While new compact lens designs and the use of metasurfacesnanostructured films with unique optical propertieshave allowed some miniaturization in this area, say the authors, this is likely reaching its limits.

Novel designs like holographic lenses and pancake lenses that involve bouncing light around between different bits of plastic or glass could help reduce the lens-to-display distance by a factor of two to three. But each of these interactions reduces the brightness of the images, which needs to be compensated for by more powerful and efficient displays.

Better displays are also needed to solve another important limitation of todays devices: resolution. Ultra-HD TV displays can achieve pixel densities of around 200 pixels per degree (PPD) at distances of around 10 feet, far in excess of the roughly 60 PPD that the human eye can distinguish. But as VR displays are at most an inch or two from the viewers eyes, they can only achieve around 15 PPD.

To match the resolution limits of the human eye, VR displays need to squeeze between 7,000 and 10,000 pixels into each inch of display, say the authors. For context, the latest smartphone screens manage only around 460 pixels per inch.

Despite the size of that gap, though, there are already clear paths towards closing it. At present, most VR headsets use separate red, green, and blue organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), which are hard to make more compact due to their manufacturing process. But an alternative approach that adds colored filters to white OLEDs could make it possible to achieve 60 PPD.

Relying on filtering has its own challenges, as it reduces the efficiency of the light source, resulting in lower brightness or higher power consumption. But an experimental OLED design known as a meta-OLED could get around this trade-off by combing the light source with nanopatterned mirrors that exploit the phenomenon of resonance to emit light only from a particular frequency.

Meta-OLEDS could potentially achieve pixel densities of more than 10,000 PPD, approaching the physical limits set by the wavelength of light. They could also be more efficient and have improved color definition compared to previous generations. However, despite keen interest from display technology companies, the technology is still nascent and likely further away from commercialization.

The most likely near-term innovation in displays, say the authors, is one that exploits a quirk of human biology. The eye is only capable of distinguishing 60 PPD in the central region of the retina know as the fovea, with significantly lower sensitivity on the periphery.

If eye movements can be accurately tracked, then you only need to render the highest definition in the particular section of the display that the user is looking at. While the required improvements in eye and head tracking add extra complexity to designs, the authors say this is probably the innovation that will happen soonest.

Its important to remember that there are a host of issues other than just better displays that will need to be solved if VR is to become widely commercialized. In particular, powering these headsets raises complicated challenges around battery capacity and the ability to dissipate heat from onboard electronics.

Also, the display technologies discussed by the researchers are primarily relevant to VR and not AR, whose headsets are likely to rely on very different optical technology that doesnt obscure the wearers view of the real world. Either way, though, it seems that while more immersive virtual experiences are likely still some way off, the road map to get us there is well in place.

Image Credit:Harry Quan / Unsplash

View original post here:

The Tech That Will Push VR to the Limits of the Human Eye - Singularity Hub

Astronomers now routinely discover planets orbiting stars outside of the solar system theyre called exoplanets. But in summer 2022, teams working on NASAs Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite found a few particularly interesting planets orbiting in the habitable zones of their parent stars.

One planet is 30 percent larger than Earth and orbits its star in less than three days. The other is 70 percent larger than Earth and might host a deep ocean. These two exoplanets are super-Earthsmore massive than Earth but smaller than ice giants like Uranus and Neptune.

Im a professor of astronomy who studies galactic cores, distant galaxies, astrobiology, and exoplanets. I closely follow the search for planets that might host life.

Earth is still the only place in the universe scientists know to be home to life. It would seem logical to focus the search for life on Earth clonesplanets with properties close to Earths. But research has shown that the best chance astronomers have of finding life on another planet is likely to be on a super-Earth similar to the ones found recently.

A super-Earth is any rocky planet that is bigger than Earth and smaller than Neptune. Image Credit: Aldaron, CC BY-SA

Most super-Earths orbit cool dwarf stars, which are lower in mass and live much longer than the sun. There are hundreds of cool dwarf stars for every star like the sun, and scientists have found super-Earths orbiting 40 percent of cool dwarfs they have looked at. Using that number, astronomers estimate that there are tens of billions of super-Earths in habitable zones where liquid water can exist in the Milky Way alone. Since all life on Earth uses water, water is thought to be critical for habitability.

Based on current projections, about a third of all exoplanets are super-Earths, making them the most common type of exoplanet in the Milky Way. The nearest is only six light-years away from Earth. You might even say that our solar system is unusual since it does not have a planet with a mass between that of Earth and Neptune.

Another reason super-Earths are ideal targets in the search for life is that theyre much easier to detect and study than Earth-sized planets. There are two methods astronomers use to detect exoplanets. One looks for the gravitational effect of a planet on its parent star and the other looks for brief dimming of a stars light as the planet passes in front of it. Both of these detection methods are easier with a bigger planet.

Over 300 years ago, German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued that Earth was the best of all possible worlds. Leibnizs argument was meant to address the question of why evil exists, but modern astrobiologists have explored a similar question by asking what makes a planet hospitable to life. It turns out that Earth is not the best of all possible worlds.

Due to Earths tectonic activity and changes in the brightness of the sun, the climate has veered over time from ocean-boiling hot to planet-wide, deep-freeze cold. Earth has been uninhabitable for humans and other larger creatures for most of its 4.5-billion-year history. Simulations suggest the long-term habitability of Earth was not inevitable, but was a matter of chance. Humans are literally lucky to be alive.

Researchers have come up with a list of the attributes that make a planet very conducive to life. Larger planets are more likely to be geologically active, a feature that scientists think would promote biological evolution. So the most habitable planet would have roughly twice the mass of Earth and be between 20 to 30 percent larger by volume. It would also have oceans that are shallow enough for light to stimulate life all the way to the seafloor and an average temperature of 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius). It would have an atmosphere thicker than Earths that would act as an insulating blanket. Finally, such a planet would orbit a star older than the sun to give life longer to develop, and it would have a strong magnetic field that protects against cosmic radiation. Scientists think that these attributes combined will make a planet super habitable.

By definition, super-Earths have many of the attributes of a super habitable planet. To date, astronomers have discovered two dozen super-Earth exoplanets that are, if not the best of all possible worlds, theoretically more habitable than Earth.

Recently, theres been an exciting addition to the inventory of habitable planets. Astronomers have started discovering exoplanets that have been ejected from their star systems, and there could be billions of them roaming the Milky Way. If a super-Earth is ejected from its star system and has a dense atmosphere and watery surface, it could sustain life for tens of billions of years, far longer than life on Earth could persist before the sun dies.

To detect life on distant exoplanets, astronomers will look for biosignatures, byproducts of biology that are detectable in a planets atmosphere.

NASAs James Webb Space Telescope was designed before astronomers had discovered exoplanets, so the telescope is not optimized for exoplanet research. But it is able to do some of this science and is scheduled to target two potentially habitable super-Earths in its first year of operations. Another set of super-Earths with massive oceans discovered in the past few years, as well as the planets discovered this summer, are also compelling targets for James Webb.

But the best chances for finding signs of life in exoplanet atmospheres will come with the next generation of giant, ground-based telescopes: the 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope, and the 24.5-meter Giant Magellan Telescope. These telescopes are all under construction and set to start collecting data by the end of the decade.

Astronomers know that the ingredients for life are out there, but habitable does not mean inhabited. Until researchers find evidence of life elsewhere, its possible that life on Earth was a unique accident. While there are many reasons why a habitable world would not have signs of life, if, over the coming years, astronomers look at these super habitable super-Earths and find nothing, humanity may be forced to conclude that the universe is a lonely place.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-CalTech

View post:

Super-Earths Are Bigger and More Habitable Than Earth, and Astronomers Are Discovering More of the Billions They Think Are Out There - Singularity Hub

Memories are finicky. Ive been touring Atlantic Canada for the past three weeks, and already my recollection of the tripdates, places, foods, adventuresdoesnt match up with pins on Google Maps or journal entries. My brain was learning new experiences and encoding memoriesjust not strongly enough to last even a week.

Memory retention gets worse with age. For people with brain injuries, such as from a stroke or physical trauma to the brain, the impairment can be utterly debilitating. What if there was a way to artificially boost the brains ability to retain memories?

The idea sounds like a Black Mirror episode. But this month, a new study in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience provided some of the first evidence that a memory prosthetic is possible in humans. The prosthetic isnt a device; rather, its a series of electrodes implanted inside the hippocampusa structure buried deep within the brain thats critical for episodic memoriesthat encodes the when, where, and what of our daily experiences.

The setup relies on an utterly unromantic view of memory. Rather than the waves of rich, detailed, emotional memories that flood our brains, it holds that memories are simply electrical signals generated by a well-regulated neural highway inside the hippocampus. If we can capture these signals while a person is learning, then in theory we could play the recordings back to the brainin the form of electrical zapsand potentially boost that particular memory.

The team built on their previous work of engineering memory prosthetics. In people with epilepsy, they showed that by re-introducing neural signals encoding one type of memory in a specific task, the zaps boosted recall by over 50 percent.

The study involved a small cohort. But incredibly, those who suffered from previous memory loss showed the best improvements.

To be clear, the team did not develop a video camera for memory. The system partially mimics the hippocampus normal process for memory encoding and recall, which can be notoriously subjective and somewhat unreliable. A similar memory prosthetic might not work well in the real world, where were constantly bombarded with new experiences and memories.

That said, the study shows a way to help people with dementia, Alzheimers, or other causes of memory loss retain snippets of their lives that could otherwise be lost.

Its a glimpse into the future of what we might be able to do to restore memory, said Dr. Kim Shapiro at the University of Birmingham, who was not involved in the study, to MIT Technology Review.

It all comes down to the electrical pulses surrounding the hippocampus and within it.

Lets zoom in. The hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure, is often described as a monolithic hub for memories. Butinsert food analogyrather than a uniform block of cheese, its more like a multi-layered cheese dip, with electrical pulses flowing through different layers as it encodes, retains, and recalls memories.

For the memory prosthetic, the team focused on two specific regions: CA1 and CA3, which form a highly interconnected neural circuit. Decades of work in rodents, primates, and humans have pointed to this neural highway as the crux for encoding memories.

The team members, led by Drs. Dong Song from the University of Southern California and Robert Hampson at Wake Forest School of Medicine, are no strangers to memory prosthetics. With memory bioengineer Dr. Theodore Bergerwhos worked on hijacking the CA3-CA1 circuit for memory improvement for over three decadesthe dream team had their first success in humans in 2015.

The central idea is simple: replicate the hippocampus signals with a digital replacement. Its no easy task. Unlike computer circuits, neural circuits are non-linear. This means that signals are often extremely noisy and overlap in time, which bolstersor inhibitsneural signals. As Berger said at the time: Its a chaotic black box.

To crack the memory code, the team worked out two algorithms. The first, called memory decoding model (MDM), takes an average of the electrical patterns across multiple people as they form memories. The other, called multi-input, multi-output (MIMO), is a tad more sophisticated, as it incorporates both input and output electrical patternsthat is, the CA3-CA1 circuitand mimics those signals in both space and timing. In theory, pulsing both electrical signals based on MDM and MIMO back into the hippocampus should give it a boost.

In a series of experiments, first in rats and monkeys, then in healthy humans, the team found that their memory prosthetics could improve memory when neural circuits were temporarily disrupted, such as with drugs. But bypassing injured circuits isnt enoughwhat they wanted was a true memory prosthetic that could replace the hippocampus if damaged.

The new study benefited from a valuable neuroscience resource: people with epilepsy who have electrodes implanted into memory-related regions of their brains. The implants, deep inside the brain, help neurosurgeons track down the source of peoples seizures. Among the 25 participants selected, some did not exhibit symptoms other than epilepsy, whereas others had mild to moderate brain injuries.

Heres the test. The participants were shown an image on a screen, then after a delay, they were shown the same image with up to seven different alternatives. Their goal was to pick out the familiar image. Each participant rapidly cycled through 100-150 trials, during which their hippocampal activity was recorded to capture their short-term memory.

After at least 15 minutes, the participants were shown 3 images and asked to rank the familiarity of each. Its a tricky task: one was a sample image from the trial, another an alternative that seemed familiar, and one never previously seen. This was intended to capture their long-term memory.

Flash forward. One day between removing the electrodes, the participants underwent another round of memory tests similar to the ones before. Some people received electrical stimulation based on their own neural signals, processed by either the MDM or MIMO algorithm. Others were zapped with random pulses. The last group received no stimulation at all.

Overall, stimulating the brains of people with epilepsy boosted memory performance by roughly 15 percent. Those pulsed with MDMwhich uses the averaged electrical signalshad a measly 13.8 percent boost. In contrast, the MIMO model, which mimics neural signals of each hippocampi, made their performance improve by 36 percent.

Irrespective of baseline memory function (impaired vs. normal), the MIMO model produces at least double the facilitation compared to the MDM model, the team said.

While promising, the study is just the next small step towards a hippocampal prosthetic. Because the participants had their electrodes removed following the second test, we dont know whethernor for how longthe effects lasted, or if continuous stimulation is necessary.

While a memory prosthetic could benefit people with Alzheimers, lots more details need to be ironed out. The electrode setup here is relatively crudewould a microarray or a non-invasive device be possible? If so, should the device be turned on 24/7? After all, we dont remember all of our memoriestheres a sort of synaptic purging thats thought to occur during sleep.

For now, the technology is far from being ready for clinical use. But its a glimpse of what could be. At the very least the study shows that, similar to a brain-controlled prosthetic limb, a memory chip isnt impossible for people who need it the most.

Image Credit: from Pixabay

Go here to see the original:

Scientists Have Long Dreamed of a Memory Prosthesis. The First Human Trials Look Promising - Singularity Hub

Today, September 26, a spacecraft moving eight times faster than a speeding bullet will impact an asteroid almost 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth. To be clear, the asteroid poses no threat to us, either before or after impact. But no one knows exactly how the collision will affect the system otherwise. What scientists learn may just save the world.

The theory is that if astronomers discover an asteroid bound for Earth, we can send a spacecraft, or kinetic impactor, to nudge it off its path. With enough advance warning, the nudge wouldnt have to be much for a would-be impactor to miss Earth entirely.

The Double Redirection Asteroid Test (DART) spacecraft was designed by NASA and launched on a SpaceX rocket last November. After nearly a year traversing the void, DART will finally arrive at a pair of asteroids, Didymos and Dimorphos. The latter of the two asteroids, a moonlet orbiting the larger Didymos, is DARTs primary target.

The spacecraft itself is basically a bus-sized, guided projectile with a GoPro. Its payload consists of just one instrument: A high-resolution camera called DRACO.

The camera will livestream images back to Earth at a rate of one image per second. Four hours before impact, when the larger asteroid Didymos will still be but a pixel of light in those images, DART will go on autopilot. The communications delay will be too much for scientists back home to take the controls. About two minutes from impact, DARTs primary target, Dimorphos, will fill the cameras field of view. It will grow and grow untilthe screen goes black. That blank screen will signify the first time humanity has altered the trajectory of a celestial body. (Theres also a chance DART will miss, in which case mission scientists will try to figure out what happened and possibly look for another target.)

NASA will broadcast the event live with two streams, the main broadcast and a livestream from DARTs perspective via DRACO (see below). The DRACO livestream begins at 5:30pm EDT / 2:30pm PST, and the main broadcast begins at 6:00pm EDT / 3:00pm PST. (DART is expected to impact Dimorphos at 7:14pm EDT / 4:14pm PST.)

[UPDATE: The DART mission went off without a hitch. You can still watch the whole broadcast or just DARTs final seconds below.]

The details of the impact will give us invaluable data for future planning.

Scientists expect DART to change Dimorphos 12-hour orbit by a few minutes. What will happen to Dimorphos itself is an open question. Last year, University of Maryland simulations suggested that, depending on its shape and where DART strikes, theres a decent chance Dimorphos will eventually begin to tumble chaotically in its orbit.

Scientists will be watching to find out.

DART recently deployed a second, smaller spacecraft about the size of a shoebox. The craft, called LICIACube, will record images of the impact from an orbit of about 55 kilometers above Dimorphos. Ground-based telescopes on Earth and the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes will also observe the aftermath. And a future European Space Agency mission, Hera, will go in for a more detailed investigation.

The first and most crucial observation will be a measurement of how Dimorphos orbit around Didymos changes after impact. Scientists are hoping to see the length of its orbit change by at least 73 seconds to prove DART was sufficiently powerful. Heras observations will add more data about the asteroids composition. Taken together, scientists can be more confident in their calculations should we discover an asteroid headed our way.

If you just take a hair off the orbital velocity, youve changed the orbit of the asteroid so that what would have been impact three or four years down the road is now a complete miss, Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA, told IEEE Spectrum.

Time, then, is our greatest ally in planetary defense. That makes completing a survey of all asteroids in our neighborhood just as important as studying ways to deflect them.

To date, astronomers have discovered over 90 percent of all near-Earth asteroids greater than 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) across. These are impactors in the range of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Weve discovered only about 40 percent of asteroids bigger than 460 feet (140 meters). This class wouldnt wipe us out, but would do extreme damage if one hit a populated area. In any given year the likelihood of a surprise impact is small, but the devastation could be significant should an asteroid strike without warning.

Todays experiment and subsequent observations will begin to give scientists the data they need to make realistic defense plans in the future. Instead of missions manned by Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, and a few nuclear warheads, maybe all well need is a small spacecraft packing just enough punch to give dangerous space rocks a nudge.

Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

Continued here:

NASA's DART Spacecraft Will Smack an Asteroid at 14,000 MPH Todayand You Can Watch - Singularity Hub

Its astonishing to revisit Kim Stanley Robinsons The Gold Coast in 2022. Published in 1988, the novel, which is the second volume in the authors Three Californias trilogy, is set in a future that then seemed suitably distant, taking place in Orange County in 2027. Nearly three and a half decades later, the potential future Robinson imagined is coming up fast in front of us, less a harbinger or a warning than a slice of life. This is the challenge of all science fiction that unfolds in the near futureI think of Blade Runner (1982), which crossed its point of singularity three years ago, or Harry Harrisons Make Room! Make Room!, written during the 1960s and set in an overpopulated New York City in 1999.

The Gold Coast fares better, temporally speaking, than either of those precursors; the future it posits remains recognizable through the lens of the present we occupy. Thats because, even early in his career (The Gold Coast was his fourth book), Robinson was a visionary writer, if not prescient exactlyprescience, it turns out, only appears to emerge in hindsightthen highly attuned to the world both as it was and as it could become. The story of a disaffected young man named Jim McPherson, the novel unfolds in a landscape that has been overdeveloped, traversed by freeways and blanketed with condos and malls. Cars rely on computerized navigation systems, while defense contractors bid to supply the Pentagon with drones. Jims father, Dennis, works for one such company, which adds a layer of generational conflict to the narrative. Its not hard to imagine, from where I live in Los Angeles, everything Robinson describes in the book occurring at this moment, just a few miles down the road.

Such a tension, of course, is necessary, the back-and-forth on which science fiction relies. The best of the genre is not about the future but, rather, is a response to, or an extrapolation of, the world in which we find ourselves. This can lead to hope or to despair; in Three Californias, Robinson engages in both. The trilogys first book, The Wild Shore, imagines an agrarian culture that has emerged after a nuclear holocaust. The third, Pacific Edge, presents a full-on ecotopia, in the vein of Ursula K. Le Guin or Ernest Callenbach.

The Gold Coast represents a counterpoint. It is a novel about what goes wrong when (in some odd way) nothing goes wrong. Without some sort of external disruption, it observes, we will continue to amuse ourselves, even if it leads us to the grave. A map, Robinson writes here, is the representation of a landscape, after all, and many landscapes, like Orange Countys, are principally psychic. A map, and a work of fiction, too. What Robinson is doing in this novel, then, as he does throughout Three Californias, is framing his own map of the future through the conundrums of the presentnot to resolve them, necessarily, but to confront them and, in so doing, to raise necessary questions about who we are and how we want to live.

St. Martins Press-3PL

THE GOLD COAST: THREE CALIFORNIAS, BY KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

$26.03

See original here:

Why You Should Read This: 'The Gold Coast' - Alta Magazine

Oftentimes, pain and testimony are appointed as the beacons for meaningful art, art with depth, and art with lessons to teach us. Pain and testimony are also powerful pieces of currency in the art world, which has arguably always been dominated by white fetishised and sensationalist interests.

As a result, there is an over-representation, and over-manufacturing, of pain and testimony, and subsequently, singularity.

In Stromaes latest album, Multitude is both the beacon and the title.

Belgian and Rwandan musician Stromae released his third full-length album this year after a nine-year hiatus. Stromaes break from producing music, performing and touring was somewhat informed by what he has stated as a lack of balance all work and no play; singularity when it came to producing work.

Multitude then arrives feeling, reading and sounding like an evolution.

The 12-track album is largely about the process, Stromaes process. While testimony is Stromaes departure point for the themes of the album, there is a use of imagination that transforms a song or a lyric into a larger world that invites the listener to see themselves in.

Multitude stages conversations in intimacy and the everyday. The tracks discuss depression, solitude and the pressure of isolation (La Solassitude), autopilot-like romantic relationships and their hollowness (Pas Vraiment) and mundane tasks such as Stromae changing his baby boys nappy (Cest Que Du Bonheur).

While these moments or experiences are generally thought of as things to get on the other side of, Stromae takes the time to blow them up in size, often with a dance beat behind them showing the everyday realities (and difficulties) that make a life, as opposed to only the major moments.

As a member of pop musics avant-garde, Stromaes signature is pairing intense lyrics with upbeat music and a distinctive dress sense. This effect is exemplified in Papaoutai, perhaps one of his most recognisable songs. The fast-paced electronic dance songs lyrics plead:

everyone knows how to make babies,

but no one knows how to make dads

Where are you?

Papa, where are you?

This kind of pairing of heavy topics with dance music has clear wit and intentionality that goes beyond a categorisation of juxtaposition. Rather, there is a demonstration of how difficult moments live with bright ones. These kinds of compositions speak to the very human desire to dance, to have a drink (or many), to indulge or to escape following a painful, harmful or exhausting experience.

Musically, Multitude is an album that has a kind of familiarity to it. Like past albums, there is a club quality and overall immensity to the tracks. Multitudes soundscape retains the immensity while sounding like it is from all over the world. Throughout the album, there is instrumentation that includes erhu, a traditional instrument from China, Congolese drum patterns, Japanese-inspired instrumentation and Brazilian Baile funk. There is also song structuring that is reminiscent of brassy and bouncy folk and childrens songs, as well as the incorporation of harpsichord, big brass melodies and Spanish-like guitar stylings.

What connects these disparate and varied sounds is familiarity. Stromae takes sounds we might have heard in passing while travelling, in a film or on the radio and gathers them up into Multitudes world. Even if they dont know exactly how Brazilian Baile funk sounds, it still sends the listener the signal that this is a song to move to.

In this way, the album pulses with the kind of intuition that Dionne Brand writes about in The Blue Clerk: It was December, we had brought a bottle of rum, some ancient ritual we remembered from nowhere and no one. The many sounds that make up Multitude feel like tapping into an intuitive sense of knowing that is relied on especially for people descended from enslavement or living in diasporas. In doing this, they feel as if they allow for connections across histories and oceans even those that have been broken by time and power.

Multitude is compelling in the way it unfolds. The album becomes more and more complete as an artistic piece with accompanying music videos, the distinct clothing and visual styles and characters, and the presentation of these in live performances.

Stromaes styling is incredibly playful and has been long-time supported by the creative label Mosaert. From an Ariana Grande-style ponytail to the white blouse and braided bun combination that accompanied the albums first single, Sant, these stylings not only establish a character but also breathe refreshing breath into the performance of masculinity, something to which Stromae is not new. In the visuals for his previous album, he dances playfully with gender. Tous les Mmes (All the Same) features one side of Stromaes face and body painted as femme and the other as masculine. The overall experience of Stromaes style is fun, simply because it is not spectacle, but part of his world-building.

Lenfer (Hell), the albums standout second single, discusses suicide ideation. On its own, the song is bombastic with looped vocals that emulate chanting or screaming. The music video adds another layer by bringing in Stromaes vulnerability.

The chorus of Lenfer reads:

Ive considered suicide a few times

And Im not proud of it

Sometimes you feel itd be the only way to silence them

All thes thoughts putting me through hell

All thes thoughts putting me through hell.

The video cycles through him singing the song and experiencing exhaustion, anxiety, anger and being unable to cope. Stromae also puts his candour on display in the way he performs the song live. His Coachella performance this year used eight robotic arms with screens to create stunning dynamic visuals to capture the volume of the songs essence and experience.

In another setting, he performed the song on a news segment, almost as a surprise. After about two minutes of discussion about the new album, the newscaster sets Stromae up by asking him if music helped him deal with the loneliness he discusses so freely on the album, and instead of answering her, he starts with Lenfer. And without any camera play or live musical backing or change in the newscasting background, Stromae sings about his vulnerability and achieves this through sincere performance.

Another standout on the album is the music video for Fils de Joie, meaning son of a hero or son of joy. The songs lyrics establish a narrator who is defending their mother, and seemingly the work their mother does, and the critique that has been thrown her way for the way she provides. The video opens with a black screen with two lines of text, one in English, one in French, that set the stage for the video:

Dans un pays imgainaire, ltat organise les funrailles dune travailleuse du sexe dfunte

In a fictional country, the state holds a funeral for a missing sex worker.

It then launches into a large state funeral in an outdoor plaza, with an audience of what looks like more than 1 000 people. Stromae is at the podium giving the national address, singing about his mother as processions take place:

But hey!

Leave my mother alone

Yes I know, shes not perfect, its true

Shes a hero

And I will always speak of her with pride

Ill speak of her with pride.

The video is massive in scale and style, and it too has a multitude of influences informing this imaginary state. Stromaes functional country recreates national symbols, processions and military plane formations, and repurposes these traditional tools of power and state mythology into communion for a world that mourns the loss of sex workers, for a world that seemingly practices an ethic of care. In the marches, dances and processions, we see a multitude of racial identities and cultural practices, from river dancing to a funeral procession of dancing and dancers inspired by traditions around death in Ghana.

The world and multitude of Stromae feels and sounds like communion. It shows his ability to work across multiple genres, multiple lyrical themes and tell visual stories that are specific but able to become their own world. Multitudes beacon provides a guide through banality, through excitement, through deep pain and through the dance we do at the end of it all.

See more here:

The Multitude of Stromae - Mail and Guardian

Location-based VR company Zero Latency announced its working with Warhammer creators Games Workshop to develop an out-of-home VR adventure based on theWarhammer 40,000: Space Marine franchise.

The free-roam VR experience, which is currently under development by Zero Latency, allows up to eight players to strap into the jackboots of the universes Space Marines for what the studio calls a thrilling 30-minute adventure to prove their ultimate loyalty to humanity.

We havent seen Warhammer 40K VR in action yet, however considering the franchises dedication to serving up lead-filled action it could be pretty similar to the studios Far Cry VR experience, which takes your team through multiple locations for a squad-based shooting action.

While taking place in a singular room, Zero Latency employs a number of clever ways to move you virtually through an ever-changing world, like in the case of Far Cry VR a cable car that takes you from place to place. Maybe a good opportunity to ride a drop pod down to a pair of land raiders?

Zero Latency is rolling out the Warhammer experience to locations starting in 2023. Spanning 24 countries with its 55+ venues, the company hosts a number of multiplayer experiences including Far Cry VR, Engineerium, Outbreak Origins, Singularity, Sol Raiders, Undead Arena, and Zombie Survival. Check out all of Zero Latencys locations here.

In the meantime, theres two other ways to go head-first into the Warhammer universe, both which may specifically appeal to certain sections of the fandom.Warhammer 40,000: Battle Sister (2020) is a co-op adventure from Pixel Toys Games which initiallylaunched on Quest, later coming to SteamVR headsets in March 2022. Its more shoot-based, while single-player Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Tempestfall (2021)from Carbon Studio is much more about melee and magic.

Here is the original post:

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is Getting a Location-based VR Experience Next Year - Road to VR