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How IoT could bring hackers into your kitchen

Internet of Things and the cloud
Pixabay Illustration

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Tens of billions of devices, ranging from coffee makers to cars to spacecraft, could someday be connected to global networks thanks to what’s known as the Internet of Things, or IoT, and cybersecurity experts say that could open up a whole new universe for hackers and eavesdroppers.

Consider the humble coffee maker, for example: University of North Carolina techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci suggested that if Chinese authorities wanted to, say, root out Muslim activists in the country’s far western Xinjiang region, they could watch for the telltale sign of coffee or tea being brewed before morning prayers.

“Your coffee maker has an IP [address], and it might be at risk of identifying these people, because if I wanted one piece of data from the region, that would be my thing. … It’s a very synchronized hour, that’s the whole point of it,” Tufekci said here last weekend during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“Holy crap, we were just talking about coffee making, right? And now we’re talking about taking people to send to internment camps,” she said. “These lines are not as far apart from one another as one would think.”

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AI (and a few jokes) will keep crews sane on Mars

Daedalus crew on "Mars"
A crew touches down on the Red Planet in “Mars,” a National Geographic miniseries that delves into the dynamics of future Mars crews. (Credit: National Geographic Channels)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — When the first human explorers head for Mars, they’re likely to have a non-human judging their performance and tweaking their interpersonal relationships when necessary.

NASA and outside researchers are already working on artificial intelligence agents to monitor how future long-duration space crews interact, sort of like the holographic doctor on “Star Trek: Voyager.” But there’ll also be a need for the human touch — in the form of crew members who could serve the roles of social directors or easygoing jokesters.

That’s the upshot of research initiatives discussed over the weekend here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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How quakes could tip us off to the ‘Really Big One’

Episodic tremors
A map of coastal Washington state and British Columbia shows the sweep of an episodic tremor and slow slip event, or ETS, from February to April 2017. The colors denote the time of the event as shown on the color-coded time bar at the bottom. The gray circles on the color bar indicate the number of tremor events per day. (UNAVCO Graphic / Kathleen Hodgkinson)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Is it the tick of Earth’s heartbeat, or a ticking time bomb? Either way, instruments that monitor a 14-month pattern in seismic activity could serve as an super-early warning system for the “Really Big One,” the massive earthquake that’s expected to hit the Pacific Northwest sometime in the next few centuries.

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White House science adviser meets the scientists

Kelvin Droegemeier
White House science adviser Kelvin Droegemeier addresses the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., with a video image of him looming in the background. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump’s newly minted science adviser reached out to his peers today at one of the country’s biggest scientific meetings and called for the establishment of a “second bold era” of basic research.

“I hope that you never forget that I am one of you, that I came from your ranks,” Kelvin Droegemeier, who was sworn in as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on Monday, told hundreds of attendees here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The University of Oklahoma meteorologist is coming into a job that was vacant for two years, in an administration that hasn’t exactly been viewed as science-friendly. The White House’s environmental policies are a particular sore point, in light of Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and regulatory rollbacks.

But Droegemeier’s selection has gotten generally good reviews from the science community. AAAS CEO Rush Holt, a Ph.D. physicist and former congressman, took note of Droegemeier’s reputation as a “solid scientist” in his introduction.

“Everyone who works with him finds him to have a very accessible manner,” Holt said. “We scientists hope and trust that this will turn into accessible policy.”

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NASA follows up on twin-astronaut tests

Scott Kelly
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly gives himself a flu shot in 2015 during his nearly yearlong stay on the International Space Station. (NASA Photo)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Almost three years after NASA astronaut Scott Kelly returned from spending nearly a year in orbit, researchers are still poring over the data collected during an unprecedented study comparing his health with that of his earthbound twin brother.

They say the comparison hasn’t raised any red flags about long-term spaceflight on the International Space Station. “On the whole, it’s encouraging,” Craig Kundrot, director of NASA’s Space Life and Physical Sciences Research and Applications Division, said here today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

But the studies have raised questions about the potential impact of exposure to weightlessness and space radiation during longer missions to the moon and Mars.

“It’s mostly green flags, and maybe a handful of things that are roughly like yellow flags, things just to keep an eye on,” said Christopher Mason, a researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine who serves as the principal investigator for the Twins Study.

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How NASA aims to put astronauts on moon by 2028

NASA's Jim Bridenstine
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine discusses the space agency’s plan to support the development of commercial hardware capable of landing astronauts on the moon. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — NASA’s leaders put out their pitch today for commercial ventures to build the hardware needed to put American astronauts back on the moon by 2028.

“This is really sustainable, this is going to be fast,” Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, told a roomful of space industry executives here at NASA Headquarters today. “We’re going to need the best and brightest from you in industry. We’re going to need the best and brightest from the international partner community to pull all this off.”

The mission architecture represents a dramatic shift from the way NASA put humans on the moon 50 years ago.

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NASA’s deputy chief echoes JFK in commercial pitch

Morhard and Bridenstine
NASA Deputy Administrator James Morhard, at left, receives congratulations from NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine after a swearing-in ceremony last October. (NASA Photo / Joel Kowsky)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — NASA’s No. 2 official channeled President John F. Kennedy today in a pitch designed to please space industry executives.

“We choose to commercialize low Earth orbit,” Deputy Administrator James Morhard declared here at the Commercial Space Transportation Conference. “We choose to have free space lanes in commerce, just as we have had free sea lanes of commerce on Earth.”

The phrasing echoed Kennedy’s famous 1962 speech that set out the goal of putting Americans on the moon. “We choose to go to the moon,” said the president, who put his goal on a par with crossing the Atlantic and climbing Mount Everest. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

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NASA sings requiem to Opportunity rover

Opportunity rover
Ths colorized image of the Opportunity rover’s shadow was taken on July 26, 2004, by the rover’s front hazard-avoidance camera as it moved farther into Endurance Crater in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars. (NASA / JPL-Caltech Photo)

After months of silence from Mars, NASA finally read the rites over its Opportunity rover, hailing the six-wheeled machine as an overachiever that found some of the first and best evidence of the Red Planet’s warmer, wetter past.

The solar-powered rover’s demise was no surprise: It fell out of contact with controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., last June — due to a globe-girdling Martian dust storm that kept Opportunity from charging its batteries.

Mission managers tried all sorts of tricks to wake up the comatose rover and re-establish communications, but it was to no avail. The last attempt was made on the night of Feb. 12.

Today’s final Opportunity news briefing took on the trappings of a memorial service, featuring far more ceremony than NASA employed when the Spirit rover — Opportunity’s twin in the Mars Exploration Rover mission — went dead in 2011.

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Boeing-Safran joint aerospace venture picks a name

Auxiliary power unit
The tail section of a FedEx 777 Freighter ecoDemonstrator flight-test airplane has been opened to reveal its auxiliary power unit, which contains a 3-D-printed titanium part. (Boeing Photo / Paul McElroy)

The 50-50 joint venture that Boeing and Europe’s Safran aerospace company formed last year to build auxiliary power units for airplanes now has a name: Initium Aerospace.

Auxiliary power units, or APUs, are onboard engines that are used primarily to start an aircraft’s main engines. They also power aircraft systems on the ground when the main engines aren’t running, and can boost onboard power during flight if necessary.

Boeing’s APUs are currently built by Honeywell and Pratt & Whitney, but Safran — which is headquartered in France — is raising its profile in the market. Initium’s rise is also part of Boeing’s drive to have a more vertically integrated supply chain, and boost its services business.

“Initium” ccmes from the Latin word for “beginning” or “start,” which refers to an APU’s function as well as the thrust of the Boeing-Safran initiative.

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Xnor shrinks AI to fit on solar-powered chip

Xnor.ai engineers and chip
Xnor.ai machine learning engineer Hessam Bagherinezhad, hardware engineer Saman Naderiparizi and co-founder Ali Farhadi show off a chip that uses solar-powered AI. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

It was a big deal two and a half years ago when researchers shrunk down an image-recognition program to fit onto a $5 computer the size of a candy bar — and now it’s an even bigger deal for Xnor.ai to re-engineer its artificial intelligence software to fit onto a solar-powered computer chip.

“To us, this is as big as when somebody invented a light bulb,” Xnor.ai’s co-founder, Ali Farhadi, said at the company’s Seattle headquarters.

Like the candy-bar-sized, Raspberry Pi-powered contraption, the camera-equipped chip flashes a signal when it sees a person standing in front of it. But the chip itself isn’t the point. The point is that Xnor.ai has figured out how to blend stand-alone, solar-powered hardware and edge-based AI to turn its vision of “artificial intelligence at your fingertips” into a reality.

“This is a key technology milestone, not a product,” Farhadi explained.

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