James Cameron once got himself onto the list for a potential visit to International Space Station. It’s just one of several surprising scientific achievements buried deep inside GQ’s massive 7,000-word profile:

After James Cameron’s Avatar came out in 2009 and made $2.7 billion, the director found the deepest point that exists in all of earth’s oceans and, in time, he dove to it. When Cameron reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a couple of hundred miles off the southwest coast of Guam, in March 2012, he became the first person in history to descend the 6.8-mile distance solo, and one of only a few people to ever go that deep….

It would be fair to call him the father of the modern action movie, which he helped invent with his debut, The Terminator, and then reinvent with his second, Aliens; it would be accurate to add that he has directed two of the three top-grossing films in history, in Avatar (number one) and Titanic (number three). But he is also a scientist — a camera he helped design served as the model for one that is currently on Mars, attached to the Mars rover — and an adventurer, and not in the dilettante billionaire sense; when Cameron sets out to do something, it gets done. “The man was born with an explorer’s instincts and capacity,” Daniel Goldin, the former head of NASA, told me….

The original Avatar… required the invention of dozens of new technologies, from the cameras Cameron shot with to the digital effects he used to transform human actors into animated creatures to the language those creatures spoke in the film. For [his upcoming Avatar sequel] The Way of Water, Cameron told me, he and his team started all over again. They needed new cameras that could shoot underwater and a motion-capture system that could collect separate shots from above and below water and integrate them into a unified virtual image; they needed new algorithms, new AI, to translate what Cameron shot into what you see….

Among other things, Cameron said, The Way of Water would be a friendly but pointed rebuke to the comic book blockbusters that now war with Cameron’s films at the top of the box office lists: “I was consciously thinking to myself, Okay, all these superheroes, they never have kids. They never really have to deal with the real things that hold you down and give you feet of clay in the real world.” Sigourney Weaver, who starred in the first Avatar as a human scientist and returns for The Way of Water as a Na’vi teenager, told me that the parallels between the life of the director and the life of his characters were far from accidental: “Jim loves his family so much, and I feel that love in our film. It’s as personal a film as he’s ever made.”

Another interesting detail from the article: Cameron and his wife became vegetarians over a decade ago, built their own pea-protein facility in Saskatchewan, and though they later sold it Cameron says he “pretty much” loves farming and pea protein as much as movies. And he once suggested re-branding the word vegan as “futurevore,” since “We’re eating the way people will eat in the future. We’re just doing it early.”

But in a 29-minute video interview, Cameron also fondly discusses his earlier ground-breaking films, even as GQ’s writer notes their new trajectory. “It is a curious fact that Cameron has directed only two feature films in the last 25 years — and perhaps more curious that both are Avatar installments, and perhaps even more curious that the next three films he hopes to direct are also Avatar sequels….

“Cameron told me he’d already shot all of a third Avatar, and the first act of a fourth. There is a script for a fifth and an intention to make it, as long as the business of Avatar holds up between now and then. It seems entirely possible — maybe even probable — that Cameron will never make another non-Avatar film again.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – James Cameron Almost Visited the Space Station – and Helped Design a Camera Now Used On Mars

This month Road & Track looked at “increased cybersecurity measures” automakers are adding to car systems — and how it’s affecting the vendors of “aftermarket” enhancements:

As our vehicles start to integrate more complex systems such as Advanced Driver Assist Systems and over-the-air updates, automakers are growing wary of what potential bad actors could gain access to by way of hacking. Whether those hacks come in an attempt to retrieve personal customer data, or to take control of certain aspects of these integrated vehicles, automakers want to leave no part of that equation unchecked. “I think there are very specific reasons why the OEMs are taking encryption more seriously,” HP Tuners director of marketing Eddie Xu told R&T. “There’s personal identifiable data on vehicles, there’s more considerations now than just engine control modules controlling the engine. It’s everything involved.”

In order to prevent this from becoming a potential safety or legal issue, companies like Ford have moved to heavily encrypt their vehicle’s software. S650 Mustang chief engineer Ed Krenz specifically noted that the new FNV architecture can detect when someone attempts to modify any of the vehicle’s coding, and that it can respond by shutting down an individual vehicle system or the vehicle entirely if that’s what is required.

That sort of total lockout presents an interesting challenge for [car performance] tuners who rely on access to things like engine and transmission control modules to create their products.
Last month Ford acknowledged tuners would find the S650 Mustang “much more difficult,” the article points out. And they add that Dodge also “intends to lock down the Engine Control Units of its upcoming electric muscle car offerings, though it will offer performance upgrades via its own over-the-air network.”

“We don’t want to lock the cars and say you can’t modify them,” Dodge CEO Kuniskis told Carscoops. “We just want to lock them and say modify them through us so that we know it’s done right.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Automakers Are Locking the Aftermarket Out of Engine Control Units

“News from Mars,” CNN reported Friday. “Not just that water was there, perhaps millions of years ago, but also these organic compounds.”

In an interview with the head of Earth Sciences collections at the UK’s Natural History Musem, CNN asked the million-dollar question. “How much more likely, if you believe so, that that makes it that there was life on Mars at some time.”

A: So what we’ve found with data that’s come back from the Rover and has been studied over the last few months is that we see igneous rocks — so these are rocks that have been formed through volcanic processes — which have also been affected by the action of liquid water.

And that’s really really interesting and exciting, because liquid water is one of the key ingredients you need for life to start. So if you’ve got the chances of life ever being on Mars, you’d need to have somewhere that had liquid water for at least a period of time. And we’ve got good evidence for that.

Now that’s combined with the fact that we’re seeing, using instruments like SHERLOCK, which is an instrument that I’m involved with, also the presence of organic molecules. And organic molecules are chemical molecules made of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sometimes bits of sulfur, sometimes bits of phosphorous, and maybe some added-up things. And those are really really important, because you need organic molecules for life to start.

And the other thing that’s really interesting about organic molecules is they can actually be sort of fossil chemical evidence of potential past life.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – CNN: NASA Discovery Reveals There May Have Been Life on Mars

Somewhere in Silicon Valley is a man “standing up to internet giants Comcast and AT&T,” reports the Mercury News. (Alternate URL here.)

“Comcast told him it would cost $17,000 to speed up his internet. He rallied 41 South Bay neighbors to build their own lightning-fast fiber-optic network instead ”

Tech-rich but internet-poor, residents of the Silicon Valley neighborhood were fed up with sluggish broadband speeds of less than 25 Megabits-per-second (Mbps) download and 3 Mbps upload — the federal definition of a home unserved by adequate internet. Frustrated by the take-it-or-leave-it attitude of internet providers, they created their own solution — and now this tony enclave has one of the fastest residential speeds in the nation.

Scott Vanderlip, a software engineer, said Comcast gave him a $17,000 estimate to connect his home to the faster internet service at a neighbor’s home. “You got to be kidding me — I can see it on the pole from my driveway,” Vanderlip said, remembering his reaction to Comcast’s quote.

So the self-described “town rebel” jumped at the chance to partner with a startup internet service provider called Next Level Networks. If Vanderlip could rally a few neighbors willing to invest a couple thousand dollars, Next Level would get them very fast internet. That was in 2017. Now, Vanderlip is president of the Los Altos Hills Community Fiber Association, which provides super-fast speeds — up to 10 Gigabits-per-second upload and download — to its over 40 association members, letting them transfer huge files and load webpages in the click of a computer mouse, Vanderlip said.

That’s 125 times faster than the median download speed in Santa Clara County.

It helped that his home “also happened to sit near a local school with a spare fiber optic internet connection,” the article points out.

But a startup internet service provider called Next Level Networks also handled “the infrastructure procurement, contracts, logistics and retail — essentially providing the residents a turnkey fiber optic internet service — while Vanderlip and two of his neighbors, who joined with an investment of $5,000 each, bought the fiber optic infrastructure, crowdsourced new members and mapped out an initial fiber route to their houses.”
Thanks to Slashdot reader k6mfw for sharing the story!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Neighbors Build Their Own Lightning-fast Fiber-optic Network

The Washington Post reports:
China is already a huge manufacturer of electric vehicles for its own market, and it is increasingly making EVs for overseas buyers, too. Made-in-China EVs are hitting U.S. dealerships and European auto shows, providing new competition to Western and Japanese automakers that have long dominated the global vehicle market.
Examples from the article:
Polestar 2, from “an automaker headquartered in Sweden and controlled by Chinese billionaire Li Shufu… The company says it will start manufacturing its next model, the Polestar 3, in the United States in 2024.”Nio ET7, “an EV company founded in Shanghai by entrepreneur William Li. The company is selling its ET7 sedan in the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and has said it aims to enter the U.S. market in 2025.”China’s largest automaker, the state-owned SAIC, “bought the British MG brand in the early 2000s and is now selling several electric MG models in Europe.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Will Made-in-China EV’s Bring New Competition for Automakers?

“Rice University researchers have engineered a key light-activated nanomaterial for the hydrogen economy,” the University announced this week.

“Using only inexpensive raw materials, a team from Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics, Syzygy Plasmonics Inc. and Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment created a scalable catalyst that needs only the power of light to convert ammonia into clean-burning hydrogen fuel….”

The research follows government and industry investment to create infrastructure and markets for carbon-free liquid ammonia fuel that will not contribute to greenhouse warming. Liquid ammonia is easy to transport and packs a lot of energy, with one nitrogen and three hydrogen atoms per molecule. The new catalyst breaks those molecules into hydrogen gas, a clean-burning fuel, and nitrogen gas, the largest component of Earth’s atmosphere. And unlike traditional catalysts, it doesn’t require heat. Instead, it harvests energy from light, either sunlight or energy-stingy LEDs….

“This discovery paves the way for sustainable, low-cost hydrogen that could be produced locally rather than in massive centralized plants,” said Peter Nordlander, also a Rice co-author.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the story (via Phys.org.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – A Light-powered Catalyst Could Be Key For Hydrogen Economy

Hackaday writes
According to [Venn Stone], technical producer over at Linux GameCast, the Sony a5000 is still a solid option for those looking to shoot 1080p video despite being released back in 2014. But while the camera is lightweight and affordable, it does have some annoying quirks — namely an overlay on the HDMI output (as seen in the image above) that can’t be turned off using the camera’s normal configuration menu. But as it so happens, using some open source tools and the venerable telnet, you can actually log into the camera’s operating system and fiddle with its settings directly.

A grassroots tool for unlocking Sony cameras apparently also unlocks developer options — including a telnet server on its WiFi interface. (There’s a video of the whole procedure on Linux Gamecast Weekly’s web site.)

Venn Stone (the podcast’s technical producer/engineer) is apparently also a long-time Slashdot reader — and also describes himself on the podcast as “not a fan of articial software limitations.”

And he calls this telnet-enabled tweak “the most hack-y thing I’ve done in recent memory” — even creating a playlist of 1990s hacker music to more fully enjoy the moment.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Telnet Gets Stubborn Sony Camera Under Control