Just two weeks after launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft has opened its “eye” and returned its first images from space — a major operational milestone for the spacecraft and DART team. Phys.Org reports: After the violent vibrations of launch and the extreme temperature shift to minus 80 degrees C in space, scientists and engineers at the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, held their breath in anticipation. Because components of the spacecraft’s telescopic instrument are sensitive to movements as small as 5 millionths of a meter, even a tiny shift of something in the instrument could be very serious. On Tuesday, Dec. 7, the spacecraft popped open the circular door covering the aperture of its DRACO telescopic camera and, to everyone’s glee, streamed back the first image of its surrounding environment. Taken about 2 million miles (11 light seconds) from Earth — very close, astronomically speaking — the image shows about a dozen stars, crystal-clear and sharp against the black backdrop of space, near where the constellations Perseus, Aries and Taurus intersect.

The DART navigation team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California used the stars in the image to determine precisely how DRACO was oriented, providing the first measurements of how the camera is pointed relative to the spacecraft. With those measurements in hand, the DART team could accurately move the spacecraft to point DRACO at objects of interest, such as Messier 38 (M38), also known as the Starfish Cluster, that DART captured in another image on Dec. 10. Located in the constellation Auriga, the cluster of stars lies some 4,200 light years from Earth. Intentionally capturing images with many stars like M38 helps the team characterize optical imperfections in the images as well as calibrate how absolutely bright an object is — all important details for accurate measurements when DRACO starts imaging the spacecraft’s destination, the binary asteroid system Didymos.

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Source: Slashdot – With Its Single ‘Eye,’ NASA’s DART Returns First Images From Space

“[John] Madden, who died Tuesday, helped bring to life a series of football video games that have generated $7 billion in revenue since 1988,” reports the New York Times. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report, written by Kellen Browning and Kevin Draper: Trip Hawkins first met John Madden in the dining car of an Amtrak train traveling from Denver to Oakland, Calif., in 1984, after Madden had agreed to lend his name and football prowess to a football simulation video game. Madden, the legendary coach and broadcaster, quickly made it clear who would be calling the shots. Because of the limits of computer processing power, Hawkins, who had founded the gaming company Electronic Arts two years earlier, floated the idea of a video game with seven-on-seven football, rather than the 11-on-11 version used in the N.F.L. Madden just stared at him, and said “that isn’t really football,” Hawkins recalled. He had to agree. “If it was going to be me and going to be pro football, it had to have 22 guys on the screen,” Madden once told ESPN. “If we couldn’t have that, we couldn’t have a game.”

The extra years spent developing a more realistic game, which was called John Madden Football and debuted in 1988 for the Apple II computer, paid off. Decades later, the Madden NFL series of video games continues to sell millions of copies annually, has helped turn E.A. into one of the world’s most prominent gaming companies and has left a lasting mark on football fandom and the N.F.L. Although he coached the Oakland Raiders to a Super Bowl victory and was lauded for his work as a television analyst, Madden, who died Tuesday at age 85, is better known to legions of younger sports fans as the namesake of the iconic video game franchise that has generated more than $7 billion in revenue. “Every dorm room right now, every basement, every couch, there’s people sitting down playing Madden,” said Scott Cole, a longtime sports broadcaster who has called games for several years for the Madden Championship Series, the most competitive Madden NFL tournaments. Slashdot reader schwit1 first shared the news of Madden’s passing.

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Source: Slashdot – How John Madden Became the ‘Larger-Than-Life’ Face of a Gaming Empire

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is currently showing “sensor tampering” alerts linked to the company’s newly deployed Microsoft 365 Defender scanner for Log4j processes. BleepingComputer reports: The alerts are reportedly mainly shown on Windows Server 2016 systems and warn of “possible sensor tampering in memory was detected by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint” created by an OpenHandleCollector.exe process. Admins have been dealing with this issue since at least December 23, according to customer reports.

While this Defender process’ behavior is tagged as malicious, there’s nothing to worry about since these are false positives, as revealed by Tomer Teller, Principal Group PM Manager at Microsoft, Enterprise Security Posture. Microsoft is currently looking into this Microsoft 365 Defender issue and working on a fix that the company should soon deliver to affected systems. “This is part of the work we did to detect Log4J instances on disk. The team is analyzing why it triggers the alert (it shouldn’t of course),” Teller explained.

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Defender Log4j Scanner Triggers False Positive Alerts

The seven-day average of COVID-19 cases topped 280,000 this week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University’s tracker. It’s a record number of new cases in the country; the last time the number of cases hit a peak close to that was January. NPR reports: Public health officials including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky say the new variant appears to be less severe than ones in the past but still emphasize the need to follow public health protocols like getting vaccinated and wearing a mask to curb the spread of the virus. Data from the White House provided at a briefing Wednesday shows the seven-day average of hospitalizations is about 9,000 per day — which is a 14% increase in hospitalizations from last week. However, there was a 60% rise in cases over the same time frame. The seven-day average of COVID-19 deaths is down from last week, at about 1,100 deaths per day.

Officials say the difference is in part because omicron causes less severe symptoms for those who are vaccinated and especially for those who are boosted. Another reason for the wide gap between the increase in hospitalizations and cases, Fauci said, is that hospitalizations tend to lag behind recorded cases. Still, “all indications point to less severe illness with omicron than delta,” he said. […] Despite the seemingly lower severity of the omicron variant, Fauci emphasized the need for people to get vaccinated and boosted. On Monday, U.S. health officials from the CDC cut isolation restrictions for Americans who catch the coronavirus from 10 to five days, and similarly shortened the time that close contacts need to quarantine.

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Source: Slashdot – US Hits Record Number of New Covid-19 Cases

The Next Web’s Tristan Greene combed through a recently published “position paper” detailing China’s views on military AI regulation and found that it “makes absolutely no mention of restricting the use of machines capable of choosing and firing on targets autonomously.” From the report: Per the paper: “In terms of law and ethics, countries need to uphold the common values of humanity, put people’s well-being front and center, follow the principle of AI for good, and observe national or regional ethical norms in the development, deployment and use of relevant weapon systems.” Neither the US or the PRC has any laws, rules, or regulations currently restricting the development or use of military LAWs.

The paper’s rhetoric may be empty, but there’s still a lot we can glean from its contents. Research analyst Megha Pardhi, writing for the Asia Times, recently opined it was intended to signal that China’s seeking to “be seen as a responsible state,” and that it may be concerned over its progress in the field relative to other superpowers. According to Pardhi: “Beijing is likely talking about regulation out of fear either that it cannot catch up with others or that it is not confident of its capabilities. Meanwhile, formulating a few commonly agreeable rules on weaponization of AI would be prudent.” “Despite the fact that neither the colonel’s article nor the PRC’s position paper mention LAWs directly, it’s apparent that what they don’t say is what’s really at the heart of the issue,” concludes Greene. “The global community has every reason to believe, and fear, that both China and the US are actively developing LAWS.”

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Source: Slashdot – China’s New AI Policy Doesn’t Prevent It From Building Autonomous Weapons

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Markets Insider: Andrew Kiguel, CEO of crypto-asset investment firm Tokens.com, estimated his metaverse portfolio is valued at 10 times more than his purchase price, USA Today said in a report published Wednesday. “It’s all about the location,” he told the newspaper, saying that land in the core of a virtual downtown is key. “The more visitors who come, the more valuable the land, and the more a retailer and advertisers will be willing to spend to reach those people.” Toronto-based Tokens.com acquired a 50% stake in Metaverse Group in October for $1.7 million, then completed an additional investment last week to give it a 67% ownership stock in the firm. The deal comes after Metaverse Group last month made a then-record $2.43 million purchase of parcels in the Decentraland metaverse platform.

Kiguel has high hopes for that virtual plot of land. “I think we’re going to see a quick appreciation and monetize renting that land and space very soon,” he told USA Today, adding that the plan is to develop the virtual area into a destination for luxury brands. Metaverse Group CEO Lorne Sugarman told Insider in November that the Decentraland property purchase, which was in its Fashion District, provides an early foothold in upscale commercial opportunities in the metaverse. “We think the Fashion District purchase is like buying on Fifth Avenue back in the 1800s or the creation of Rodeo Drive,” he said, referring to the high-end shopping areas in Manhattan and Beverly Hills. Earlier this month, someone by the name of P-Ape bought a plot of digital land in Snoop Dogg’s new virtual world, Snoopverse, for $450,000. “The rapper announced that he would be building his own virtual world in the metaverse on the Sandbox platform this September,” reports Fortune.

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Source: Slashdot – Metaverse Property Mogul Touts 10-Fold Appreciation In Virtual Real Estate Portfolio

Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt announced that on December 28th, it successfully produced the first lithium-ion battery cell to be designed, developed, and built completely in Europe by a homegrown company. Teslarati reports: “Last night, the commissioning of the Northvolt Ett gigafactory in northern Sweden led to the assembly of the first battery cell,” Northvolt wrote. The company’s factory, located in Vasteras, Sweden, is the first factory in Europe to have a cell that has been “fully designed, developed and assembled at a gigafactory by a homegrown European battery company,” the company added. The production of the cell is a massive milestone for Northvolt, which has been working to get its gigafactory up and running since 2017. The company said the cell is of a prismatic cell format, which consist of large sheets of anodes, cathodes, and separators sandwiched, rolled up, and pressed to fit into a metallic or hard-plastic housing in cubic form, according to AllAboutCircuits.

Northvolt Labs in Vasteras has been in production since early 2020, the company said. Northvolt plans to expand the production capacity of the facility toward 60 GWh per year, which will fulfill over $30 billion worth of contracts the battery maker has already locked up with various automotive manufacturers, including BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo, Polestar, Fluence, and Scania. Northvolt Ett will commercially deliver various cell types in 2022. While the company is based in Europe and has various partnerships with European automotive and energy storage companies, it has no plans to only service entities that are only located on the same continent.

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Source: Slashdot – Sweden’s Northvolt Builds First Lithium-Ion Battery Cell In Europe