AMC and Sony Pictures are giving away 86,000 NFTs to Stubs Premiere, A-List and Investor Connect members who buy or reserve tickets for Spider-Man: No Way Home showings on December 16th. Engadget reports: Redeem a code through a special website and you’ll get one of 100 designs available through the more eco-friendly Wax blockchain. You’ll need to order your tickets through the AMC Theatres website or mobile app when pre-orders launch on November 29th. If you qualify, you’ll get your code on December 22nd and will have until March 1st, 2022 to claim the NFT.

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Source: Slashdot – AMC, Sony Will Hand Out NFTs To ‘Spider-Man’ Advance Ticket Buyers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from India Today: For the first time in history, a commercial Airbus plane made a successful landing on the white continent of Antarctica. One of the company’s A340 planes touched down on an ice runway earlier this month, paving the way for more tourism on the frozen landmass. The A340 took off on the morning of November 2 from Cape Town, South Africa before flying 2,500 nautical miles (4,630 km) to Antarctica. It then achieved an aviation first by successfully landing on a runway made of “blue glacial ice,” according to the aircraft’s pilot, Captain Carlos Mirpuri.

CNN reported that the historic flight was operated by Hi Fly, a boutique aviation company, and was chartered by Wolf’s Gang luxury adventure camp. The aircraft will be used this season to fly a small number of tourists, alongside scientists and cargo to the icy continent. There was “attention and anxiety” in the cockpit as the 190-tonne plane approached the runway in Antarctica. Captain Mirpuri detailed how the runway had to have special grooves carved into it to allow for more friction as the aircraft landed, which would have otherwise slipped down the icy course due to its heavy supply cargo. The pilots also had to wear special eye gear due to the glare coming off the polar ice. Thankfully, Mirpuri and the rest of the A340’s crew managed to land safely and they took less than three hours to deliver all of the cargo.

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Source: Slashdot – Airbus A340 Plane Lands On Antarctica For First Time

The US scientists who created the first living robots say the life forms, known as xenobots, can now reproduce — and in a way not seen in plants and animals. CNN reports: Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which it takes its name, xenobots are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020 after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and self-heal. Now the scientists that developed them at the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering said they have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction different from any animal or plant known to science.

[T]hey found that the xenobots, which were initially sphere-shaped and made from around 3,000 cells, could replicate. But it happened rarely and only in specific circumstances. The xenobots used “kinetic replication” — a process that is known to occur at the molecular level but has never been observed before at the scale of whole cells or organisms […]. With the help of artificial intelligence, the researchers then tested billions of body shapes to make the xenobots more effective at this type of replication. The supercomputer came up with a C-shape that resembled Pac-Man, the 1980s video game. They found it was able to find tiny stem cells in a petri dish, gather hundreds of them inside its mouth, and a few days later the bundle of cells became new xenobots.

The xenobots are very early technology — think of a 1940s computer — and don’t yet have any practical applications. However, this combination of molecular biology and artificial intelligence could potentially be used in a host of tasks in the body and the environment, according to the researchers. This may include things like collecting microplastics in the oceans, inspecting root systems and regenerative medicine. While the prospect of self-replicating biotechnology could spark concern, the researchers said that the living machines were entirely contained in a lab and easily extinguished, as they are biodegradable and regulated by ethics experts. “Most people think of robots as made of metals and ceramics but it’s not so much what a robot is made from but what it does, which is act on its own on behalf of people,” said Josh Bongard, a computer science professor and robotics expert at the University of Vermont and lead author of the study, writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “In that way it’s a robot but it’s also clearly an organism made from genetically unmodified frog cell.”

“The AI didn’t program these machines in the way we usually think about writing code. It shaped and sculpted and came up with this Pac-Man shape,” Bongard said. “The shape is, in essence, the program. The shape influences how the xenobots behave to amplify this incredibly surprising process.”

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Source: Slashdot – World’s First Living Robots Can Now Reproduce, Scientists Say

James Rundle writes via the Wall Street Journal: A few years ago, executives at Intel began to realize they had a problem. The company was making dozens of new products each year, from chips to software platforms, but it didn’t have a formal method for cataloging and storing older technology so engineers could test it for security flaws. […] Intel’s answer to this conundrum was to create a warehouse and laboratory in Costa Rica, where the company already had a research-and-development lab, to store the breadth of its technology and make the devices available for remote testing. After planning began in mid-2018, the Long-Term Retention Lab was up and running in the second half of 2019. The lab gives Intel, which is based in Santa Clara, Calif., and has more than 100,000 employees, a centralized, secure location where security tests can be run from anywhere in the world. Access to the building is strictly controlled and approved by senior managers, while surveillance cameras watch the equipment at all times. Even its location is secret — Intel representatives declined to say where exactly it is.

The lab brings commercial value to Intel, [said Mohsen Fazlian, general manager of Intel’s product assurance and security unit.], citing company research that shows customers are more likely to buy technology from manufacturers that proactively test their products. […] The lab has changed Intel’s product development. All new technology is now built with the facility in mind, with technical documentation created to allow engineers to support it for up to 10 years, and units are sent to the lab before they are released, Mr. Fazlian said. “Hopefully, I will never find myself searching eBay for Intel hardware again,” he said.

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Source: Slashdot – Intel Is Stockpiling Legacy Technology For Security Research