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NASA's Psyche Hits 25 Mbps From 140 Miles Away

Slashdot.org - Tue, 04/30/2024 - 05:00
Richard Speed reports via The Register: NASA's optical communications demonstration has hit 25 Mbps in a test transmitting engineering data back to Earth from 140 million miles (226 million kilometers) away. The payload is riding aboard the Psyche probe, which is headed for an asteroid of the same name. On December 11, when the spacecraft was 19 million miles (30 million kilometers) away, it reached 267 Mbps, which NASA described as "comparable to broadband internet download speeds." However, as Psyche has continued on its trajectory, the distances have become greater, and the rate at which data can be transmitted and received has tumbled. At 140 million miles, the project's goal was to reach a lofty 1 Mbps. Instead, engineers managed to get 25 Mbps out of the demonstration. Earlier demonstrations tested the technology using preloaded data, such as a cat video. The latest experiment used a copy of engineering data also sent via Psyche's radio transmitter. "We downlinked about 10 minutes of duplicated spacecraft data during a pass on April 8," said Meera Srinivasan, the project's operations lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. "Until then, we'd been sending test and diagnostic data in our downlinks from Psyche. This represents a significant milestone for the project by showing how optical communications can interface with a spacecraft's radio frequency comms system." The demonstrator is only along for the ride -- Psyche uses conventional radio technology for its mission. However, the demonstration does point to the potential for higher-bandwidth communications in future projects.

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10 women-led startups in MENA join our newest AI program10 women-led startups in MENA join our newest AI programManaging Director, Google MENA

GoogleBlog - Tue, 04/30/2024 - 04:00
Growth Academy: Women in AI selects its cohort of 10 MENA startups.Growth Academy: Women in AI selects its cohort of 10 MENA startups.
Categories: Technology

Russia Clones Wikipedia, Censors It, Bans Original

Slashdot.org - Tue, 04/30/2024 - 02:00
Jules Roscoe reports via 404 Media: Russia has replaced Wikipedia with a state-sponsored encyclopedia that is a clone of the original Russian Wikipedia but which conveniently has been edited to omit things that could cast the Russian government in poor light. Real Russian Wikipedia editors used to refer to the real Wikipedia as Ruwiki; the new one is called Ruviki, has "ruwiki" in its url, and has copied all Russian-language Wikipedia articles and strictly edited them to comply with Russian laws. The new articles exclude mentions of "foreign agents," the Russian government's designation for any person or entity which expresses opinions about the government and is supported, financially or otherwise, by an outside nation. [...] Wikimedia RU, the Russian-language chapter of the non-profit that runs Wikipedia, was forced to shut down in late 2023 amid political pressure due to the Ukraine war. Vladimir Medeyko, the former head of the chapter who now runs Ruviki, told Novaya Gazeta Europe in July that he believed Wikipedia had problems with "reliability and neutrality." Medeyko first announced the project to copy and censor the 1.9 million Russian-language Wikipedia articles in June. The goal, he said at the time, was to edit them so that the information would be "trustworthy" as a source for all Russian users. Independent outlet Bumaga reported in August that around 110 articles about the war in Ukraine were missing in full, while others were severely edited. Ruviki also excludes articles about reports of torture in prisons and scandals of Russian government representatives. [...] Graphic designer Constantine Konovalov calculated the number of characters changed between Wikipedia RU and Ruviki articles on the same topics, and found that there were 205,000 changes in articles about freedom of speech; 158,000 changes in articles about human rights; 96,000 changes in articles about political prisoners; and 71,000 changes in articles about censorship in Russia. He wrote in a post on X that the censorship was "straight out of a 1984 novel." Interestingly, the Ruviki article about George Orwell's 1984 entirely omits the Ministry of Truth, which is the novel's main propaganda outlet concerned with governing "truth" in the country.

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G7 Reaches Deal To Exit From Coal By 2035

Slashdot.org - Mon, 04/29/2024 - 22:30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Energy ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) major democracies reached a deal to shut down their coal-fired power plants in the first half of the 2030s, in a significant step towards the transition away from fossil fuels. "There is a technical agreement, we will seal the final political deal on Tuesday," said Italian energy minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, who is chairing the G7 ministerial meeting in Turin. On Tuesday the ministers will issue a final communique detailing the G7 commitments to decarbonize their economies. Pichetto said the ministers were also pondering potential restrictions to Russian imports of liquefied natural gas to Europe which the European Commission is due to propose in the short-term. The agreement on coal marks a significant step in the direction indicated last year by the COP28 United Nations climate summit to phase out fossil fuels, of which coal is the most polluting. Italy last year produced 4.7% of its total electricity through a handful of coal-fired stations. Rome currently plans to turn off its plants by 2025, except on the island of Sardinia where the deadline is 2028. In Germany and Japan coal has a bigger role, with the share of electricity produced by the fuel higher than 25% of total last year. "This is another nail in the coffin for coal," said Dave Jones, Ember's Global Insights program director. "The journey to phase out coal power has been long: it's been over seven years since the UK, France, Italy, and Canada committed to phase out coal power, so it's good to see the United States and especially Japan at last be more explicit on their intentions." "The problem is that whilst coal power has already been falling, gas power has not. G7 nations already promised to 'fully or predominantly' decarbonize their power sectors by 2035, and that would mean phasing out not only coal by 2035 but also gas. Coal might be the dirtiest, but all fossil fuels need to be ultimately phased out." Further reading: Countries Consider Pact To Reduce Plastic Production By 40% in 15 Years

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Tether Buys $200 Million Majority Stake In Brain-Computer Interface Company

Slashdot.org - Mon, 04/29/2024 - 21:02
Crypto company Tether announced Monday that it has invested $200 million to acquire a majority stake in brain-computer interface company Blackrock Neurotech via its venture capital division Tether Evo. [The firm is not related to the asset management giant BlackRock.] CoinDesk reports: Blackrock Neurotech develops medical devices that are powered by brain signals and aims to help people impacted by paralysis and neurological disorders. The investment will fund the roll-out and commercialization of the medical devices and also for research and development purposes, the press release said. Tether is the company behind USDT, the largest stablecoin with a market cap of $110 billion. Recently, Tether established four divisions to expand beyond stablecoin issuance. "Tether has long believed in nurturing emerging technologies that have transformative capabilities, and the Brain-Computer-Interfaces of Blackrock Neurotech have the potential to open new realms of communication, rehabilitation, and cognitive enhancement," Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, said in a statement.

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T2 Linux 24.5 Released

Linux.Slashdot.org - Mon, 04/29/2024 - 20:25
ReneR writes: A major T2 Linux milestone has been released, shipping with full support for 25 CPU architectures and several C libraries, as well as restored support for Intel IA-64 Itanium. Additionally, many vintage X.org DDX drivers were fixed and tested to work again, as well as complete support for the latest KDE 6 and GNOME 46. T2 is known for its sophisticated cross compile support and support for nearly all existing CPU architectures: Alpha, Arc, ARM(64), Avr32, HPPA(64), IA64, M68k, MIPS(64), Nios2, PowerPC(64)(le), RISCV(64), s390x, SPARC(64), and SuperH x86(64). T2 is an increasingly popular choice for embedded systems and virtualization. It also still supports the Sony PS3, Sgi, Sun and HP workstations, as well as the latest ARM64 and RISCV64 architectures. The release contains a total of 5,140 changesets, including approximately 5,314 package updates, 564 issues fixed, 317 packages or features added and 163 removed, and around 53 improvements. Usually most packages are up-to-date, including Linux 6.8, GCC 13, LLVM/Clang 18, as well as the latest version of X.org, Mesa, Firefox, Rust, KDE 6 and GNOME 46! More information, source and binary distribution are open source and free at T2 SDE.

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Categories: Linux

T2 Linux 24.5 Released

Slashdot.org - Mon, 04/29/2024 - 20:25
ReneR writes: A major T2 Linux milestone has been released, shipping with full support for 25 CPU architectures and several C libraries, as well as restored support for Intel IA-64 Itanium. Additionally, many vintage X.org DDX drivers were fixed and tested to work again, as well as complete support for the latest KDE 6 and GNOME 46. T2 is known for its sophisticated cross compile support and support for nearly all existing CPU architectures: Alpha, Arc, ARM(64), Avr32, HPPA(64), IA64, M68k, MIPS(64), Nios2, PowerPC(64)(le), RISCV(64), s390x, SPARC(64), and SuperH x86(64). T2 is an increasingly popular choice for embedded systems and virtualization. It also still supports the Sony PS3, Sgi, Sun and HP workstations, as well as the latest ARM64 and RISCV64 architectures. The release contains a total of 5,140 changesets, including approximately 5,314 package updates, 564 issues fixed, 317 packages or features added and 163 removed, and around 53 improvements. Usually most packages are up-to-date, including Linux 6.8, GCC 13, LLVM/Clang 18, as well as the latest version of X.org, Mesa, Firefox, Rust, KDE 6 and GNOME 46! More information, source and binary distribution are open source and free at T2 SDE.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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