With concerns around generative AI ever-present, Google has announced an expansion of its Vulnerability Rewards Program (VRP) focused on AI-specific attacks and opportunities for malice. As such, the company released updated guidelines detailing which discoveries qualify for rewards and which fall out of scope. For example, discovering training data extraction that leaks private, sensitive information falls in scope, but if it only shows public, nonsensitive data, then it wouldn’t qualify for a reward. Last year, Google gave security researchers $12 million for bug discoveries.
Google explained that AI presents different security issues than their other technology — such as model manipulation and unfair bias — requiring new guidance to mirror this. “We believe expanding the VRP will incentivize research around AI safety and security, and bring potential issues to light that will ultimately make AI safer for everyone,” the company said in a statement. “We’re also expanding our open source security work to make information about AI supply chain security universally discoverable and verifiable.”
AI companies, including Google, gathered at the White House earlier this year, committing to greater discovery and awareness of AI’s vulnerabilities. The company’s VRP expansion also comes ahead of a “sweeping” executive order from President Biden reportedly scheduled for Monday, October 30, which would create strict assessments and requirements for AI models before any use by government agencies.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-expands-its-bug-bounty-program-to-target-generative-ai-attacks-120049796.html?src=rss
Traeger, Kamado Joe and Weber are some of the biggest names in smart grilling. These companies have built numerous products that allow you to control and monitor their grills, usually pellet-burning setups, from the comfort of your living room or while you run an errand. Based right outside of Augusta, Georgia, Recteq is another company that’s doing the same. If you aren’t familiar with its products, now is a great time for an introduction as its new lineup has two novel takes on the pellet grill that offer something those larger competitors don’t.
Flat-top griddles are all the rage in backyard grilling right now. The popularity of smash burgers and the ability to cook everything from breakfast to fajitas and fried rice make them a versatile piece of any grill setup. Until now, most of them have been gas-powered and some companies offer griddle inserts for equipping a charcoal, gas or pellet grill you might already have with a large, flat cooking surface. Recteq has taken a different approach, opting instead to stick to its pellet grill roots with what it says is the first wood-fired griddle.
“We’ve had our eye on griddles for a while,” Recteq’s VP of product development Ben Lesshafft explained to Engadget. “We didn’t want to just go with a gas grill, we’re not a gas grill company. We believe in wood fired food and we believe in wood-fired flavor.” Lesshafft said the company knew there had to be a way to do something different by introducing the smoke flavor from pellets into a category where nearly all of the grills work the same way.
Recteq SmokeStone 600
Recteq
To design this wood-fired grill, which Recteq calls the SmokeStone 600 ($999), the company drew on its experience building the direct-fire Bullseye grill. That model looks like a mashup of a pellet grill and a charcoal kettle, allowing you to do both high-heat cooking and low-and-slow smoking, but it was designed primarily for the former with temps topping out at nearly 750 degrees Fahrenheit. Another challenge was making sure a pellet-powered griddle offered even heat distribution.
“That took us quite a bit of time,” Lesshafft noted. “I spent more time with thermometers in a couple months than I did in my entire life previously combined.”
Of course, there has to be a method for getting the pellet smoke to roll over the grilling surface in order to impart that wood flavor. To achieve this, Recteq designed a 360-degree vent system around the griddle. The SmokeStone has a blower fan like any other pellet grill that regulates the temperature and intensity of the fire, but it also pushes smoke into the upper cooking chamber. The company includes a raised lip on the griddle surface to help corral any small bits of food, but it also made sure those smoke vents were tall enough to clear it. This design means smoke rolls over your food whether the lid is open or closed.
“The smoke kind of ends up coming across the surface of the grill, because it’s forced out at such a velocity that it has to shoot out before it finally relaxes,” he said. “What we discovered is, the beauty of it, you [can] cook with the lid up or down. You’re going get some smoke no matter what, because you’re always burning wood.”
And on top of imparting some wood-fired flavor into griddled foods that ordinarily wouldn’t get it, the SmokeStone is still a smart grill. There’s Wi-Fi onboard for controlling and monitoring grill and food temperatures from your phone, plus an algorithm to make sure the controller keeps things consistent and even throughout your cook. A temperature range of 300-600 degrees also gives you some room to adjust based on what you’re cooking.
Recteq DualFire 1000
Recteq
A pellet-burning griddle isn’t the only unique entry in Recteq’s new lineup, though. The company also debuted a dual-chamber pellet grill that allows you to cook at two different temperatures at the same time. With the DualFire 1200 ($1,799), Recteq sought to improve another popular grill configuration. If you’ve taken a stroll down the grill aisle at your local hardware store in the last decade or so, chances are you’ve seen grills that offer one side for charcoal and another for gas. Maybe you’ve come across one more recently that’s pellet and gas. While Recteq understood the utility of the two sections, Lesshafft and his colleagues decided making both pellet burning offered something that didn’t yet exist.
“We did not invent the dual-chamber grill, they’ve been out forever,” he said. “One of the reasons these dual chamber grills sell is people love the fact that you can go low-and-slow on one side and hot-and-fast on the other. And so that was kind of the evolution of our philosophy.”
Lesshafft further explained that he never understood the 50-50 split of the barrel of dual-chamber cookers, so Recteq opted instead for a 65-35 division. He said this allows for larger cuts like brisket on the bigger, more traditional pellet grill side while the smaller chamber is designed for direct-fire searing. You can do low-and-slow on both sides, but the left side is closer to the heat source and lacks the convection of a typical pellet grill.
Recteq also refreshed its main pellet grills, giving them an updated leg design, better wheels and an improved controller. The company also changed the shape of the RT-590, now called the Deck Boss 590, to be consistent with the rest of its lineup. Previously, it had an octagon-shaped barrel, but now it’s round like the others. Recteq also saw an opportunity to give customers a mid-range option between the Deck Boss and its largest new grill, the Flagship 1100 (replacing the RT-700). That’s where the Backyard Beast 1000 comes in.
Recteq DeckBoss 590
Recteq
“The intentional difference between grills is really a matter of size,” said Lesshafft. “You have more capacity, you have more headroom, and it gets rid of the buyer confusion of also changing shapes.” The numbers correspond to square inches of grillings space, where the Backyard Beast doesn’t have a second shelf inside the cooking chamber. It also doesn’t have quite as much pellet hopper capacity as the Flagship. A third option also allows the company to bridge the gap price-wise between its most affordable new grill and its largest “traditional” pellet model. The Deck Boss is $899, the Backyard Beast is $1,099 and the Flagship is $1,299. Of course, ditching the old alphanumeric product names eliminates customer confusion, and Lesshafft admitted there was even some trouble with the names amongst employees (please take note, Sony).
All five of the new grills are equipped with the updated controller, though it functions differently on models like the SmokeStone and DualFire due to their direct-heat setups. And, of course, the DualFire needs special firmware in order to run two grills. A new display is both easier to use and easier to read thanks to better knob and larger letters and numbers. Recteq also ditched the large, external antenna for an internal one that offers similar Wi-Fi range without the gaudy appearance. Lesshafft explained that nothing was off the table in terms of the redesigned controls. However, the company really wanted to focus more on the app rather than putting a touchscreen on its grills like Traeger did.
“If people are going to [swipe through recipes], they’re probably going to do it on their phone or their tablet,” he noted. “We kept the physical interface similar, we just wanted to improve it, but we didn’t really want to give it a full-blown facelift.”
Another key element of the new controller is dual-band connectivity. Recteq introduced this on its grills over the last couple of years, and as someone who has struggled to connect a 2.4G grill in a mostly 5G world, this makes the setup process much easier. Lesshafft also quipped that this reduced W-Fi-related calls to customer service. And overall, the company has been continually trying to improve the quality of its app. It is, of course, the place where you monitor temperatures and control the grill, but it’s also where you can browse recipes, make notes and revisit temperature graphs. In other words, it needs to be reliable and deliver what’s promised. Lesshafft admitted that wasn’t always the case.
“There was a day when our ratings weren’t very good on iOS, and now we’re the highest rated growing app,” he said. “The app has come a long way. We’re pretty proud of it.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/how-recteqs-dual-chamber-and-griddle-designs-put-a-unique-spin-on-pellet-grills-120025500.html?src=rss
Enlarge/ A view of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) taken earlier this year. (credit: Maarten Butter)
Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.
Good morning. It is October 26, and today’s image showcases a comet that made its closest approach to Earth on February 1 of this year. The comet has an unwieldy name, Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF). But this tells us a lot about it, actually. The “C” means that it is non-periodic, meaning that it originated in the Oort cloud that lies at the edge of our Solar System.
We can also discern that the comet was discovered in 2022, and was the third comet discovered during the first half of March (E3). Finally, the ZTF refers to its discovery by the Zwicky Transient Facility, where a 1.2-meter telescope is used to survey the night sky for just such objects.
Even after smoke from a wildfire has visibly cleared, lingering toxins indoors can tank air quality and threaten our health. Harmful chemicals stick around on surfaces and release into the air—and, new research found, air filters won’t get rid of them.
If you’re tired of static wallpapers, you can add a bit of flair to your smartphone by choosing a live wallpaper—that is, using a Live Photo, gif, or short video as your wallpaper. Before you opt to go live, though, you should know it comes with a small hit to your phone’s battery life, and on older phones, it may…
Quick guide on how to install Visual Studio Code on Debian 12 Bookworm utilizing it’s APT repository to install the latest VSCode stable or insider build.
Meta’s Threads continues to grow, all while the service it aped, X, continues to splutter and fall apart. Mark Zuckerberg said that Threads currently has “just under” 100 million monthly active users and that the app could reach 1 billion users in the next couple of years.
Threads picked up 100 million sign-ups in its first week, with easy ways to create an account from your existing Instagram profile. However, engagement dropped off amid complaints about limited functionality and feeds flooded with unwanted posts from brands and users with big audience numbers on Instagram. I was not interested in the piecemeal thoughts of startup execs with a podcast. Shocking, I know.
Meta has since steadily added new features, and engagement seems to have rebounded in recent weeks as Elon Musk continues to make unpopular changes to X, like stripping headlines from links and well, all the other things.
– Mat Smith
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X (formerly known as Twitter) has begun rolling out yet another feature nobody asked for. Now, users will have the option to call each other via audio and video calls on the platform. This doesn’t come as a total surprise, as CEO Linda Yaccarino previously confirmed that video chat would be coming to the social media site back in August. The best explanation for the addition is Elon Musk’s aim to make X the “everything” app – a one-stop shop for multiple features and services.
It also offers 4K 120p video and ActiveTrack 6.0 stabilization.
Engadget
DJI’s Osmo Pocket 3 gimbal camera has arrived with major updates over the previous model, adding a much larger 1-inch sensor that should greatly improve image quality. It also packs a new 2-inch display with 4.7 times the area of the last model. That said, It’s also significantly more expensive than the Pocket 2 was at launch. It costs $520 in the US, $170 more than the Pocket 2.
Apple One, Arcade and News+ plans are now more expensive too.
The price of Apple TV+ is going up by $3 per month to $10. The annual TV+ plan has risen from $69 to $99. Apple Arcade is now $7 per month instead of $5. As for Apple News+, that’ll now run you $13 per month for a standalone subscription, up from $10. The cost of an Apple TV+ subscription previously went up from $5 per month to $7 in October 2022, meaning that the price of the service has doubled in just over 12 months.
In The Mix will take place in Arizona on December 10.
TikTok
TikTok In The Mix will take place in Mesa, Arizona on December 10 – the first global live music event from the video platform. The headliners are Cardi B, Niall Horan, Anitta and Charlie Puth, with surprise guests and performances by emerging artists. Followers of the four headliners will get presale codes to buy In The Mix tickets starting on October 27. The general sale will start on November 2 and TikTok will stream the event live on its app too.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-metas-threads-reaches-almost-100-million-active-users-111509107.html?src=rss
Adding to the long list of improvements to find with next year’s KDE Plasma 6.0 release is better file/folder searching with the “Recent Files” search area…
Apple has introduced a completely new way to interact with the Apple Watch without ever needing to use the touchscreen. It’s called Double Tap and it arrives today via the watchOS 10.1 update. The Verge reports: With a quick pinching motion, you can use it to scroll through the new smart stack of widgets in watchOS 10, pause or end timers, skip music tracks, and answer phone calls. It’s the sort of feature that you might read about and scoff at — until you’re unloading groceries from your car, hands full, and an important call comes through on your watch. […] Double tap technically isn’t a new gesture so much. In 2021, Apple introduced Assistive Touch, an accessibility feature designed for people with limb differences or mobility issues. The idea was to give these folks a way to navigate through menus and control the Apple Watch without needing a second hand.
On the surface, it can seem like double tap is a rebadged version of Assistive Touch. That’s led to understandable confusion as to how the two features differ — and why double tap isn’t available on older Apple Watches that support Assistive Touch (Series 4 or later, including the first-gen SE and Ultra). The short answer is that the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 have a more powerful chip. Specifically, the new S9 features four neural engines for machine learning, which is what powers double tap. On older watches, Assistive Touch was run on the main CPU.
But practically speaking, it’s easier to see how Assistive Touch and double tap differ once you try using both. […] Double tap isn’t designed to help you navigate anything. The best way I can describe it is Assistive Touch is like the mouse to your computer. It scrolls, it selects, and it’s highly programmable. Double tap is more like the double-click portion of using a mouse. You use it solely to perform the main action of an app. And to do that, Apple had to spend a lot of time researching what people wanted or expected a single double tap to do. […] And, when double tap performs as intended, it does feel a bit like the watch can read my mind. It’s genuinely cool to see double tap work with not just my index finger but the rest of them as well. To my surprise, it feels less gimmicky than I expected. But despite Apple’s efforts, it doesn’t take long to run into double tap’s limitations…
ICP Germany recently presented a Fanless embedded PC for high-performance applications such as machine vision, automation, IoT and industrial control. The MA1 is compatible with both NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX and Nano modules. Users have the option to configure the MA1 Fanless PC with NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 8GB (10~20W), 16GB (10~25W) or the NVIDIA […]
If you’ve been looking for a high-end smart speaker with a subwoofer, Amazon has an interesting deal in its Echo lineup right now. It’s got a bundle deal with the high-end Echo Studio and the Echo sub, with both on sale for $248 instead of $330, saving you $82 (24 percent). Those are a killer combo for home theater and more, particularly if you get a second Echo Studio to make a stereo pair.
The Echo Studio appears in our guide to the best smart speakers as an alternative to the Sonos Era 100 for those who already rely on Alexa. It’s the largest smart speaker Amazon makes, and it put the space to good use. There’s a 24-bit DAC (digital-to-analog converter) and an amplifier, along with five separate speakers, allowing for crisp sound throughout the frequency range. We gave it an 88 in our review, and noted the quality, hi-res sound that does justice to HD and lossless music — but also makes regular old Spotify tracks sound pretty good.
For those who need more bass, the Echo sub adds 100W of low-frequency power and a6-inch downward-firing woofer, enhancing the already solid bass on the Echo Studio. If you add a second Echo Studio, you’ll get true stereo 2.1 sound. The latter isn’t on sale alone right now but has been in the past. In any case, if you’re an Alexa fan and want the ultimate sound without paying Sonos money, now is a great time to get this combo.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazons-echo-studio-and-echo-sub-bundle-is-24-percent-off-right-now-085559003.html?src=rss
Spotify’s royalty model will get a massive revamp next year to give “working artists” a bigger cut, according to Music Business Worldwide. Starting in the first quarter of 2024, Spotify will reportedly implement three changes meant to “combat three drains on the royalty pool.” The first one is establishing a minimum number of annual streams a track must reach before it starts generating royalties, which is supposed to demonetize tracks that earn less than 5 cents a month.
Apparently, while these tracks make up a tiny percentage of music on the platform — 99.5 percent of all monetized content will still be earning money after this change — their royalties still cost Spotify tens of millions of dollars a year. Based on Music Business Worldwide’s computations, a track has to generate 200 plays a year to be able to earn 5 cents. As The Verge notes, the company is already getting flak for this particular change, because there are a lot of indie tracks that don’t reach that threshold. Smaller artists might see their already meager earnings dwindle so that popular artists could get paid more.
Meanwhile, the second change coming to the platform will leverage its anti-fraud detection technology. If it detects illegal activity, such as the use of AI tools to repeatedly stream tracks and artificially boost their play count, the company will slap their distributors with financial penalties. Spotify is hoping that by enforcing a per-track penalty, it could deter people from committing streaming fraud in the long run. How effective this move is, of course, depends on the accuracy of the company’s fraud detection technology.
The third and the last change in the service’s royalty model will affect creators of “non-music noise content,” such as white noise and binaural beats. At the moment, there are a lot of noise tracks on Spotify that are only 31 seconds long, uploaded that way because the platform pays for every play that’s longer than half a minute. With the change that’s supposedly coming, though, Spotify will require these noise tracks to meet a minimum length of time before they can generate royalties.
While this move can potentially cut noise creators’ earnings significantly, Spotify originally wanted to take even more drastic measures. According to a previous Bloomberg report, the company considered removing white noise content from its platform altogether and prohibiting future uploads in the category, because doing so would raise its annual gross profit by as much as $38 million. Spotify neither confirmed nor denied these changes — “We do not have any news to share at this time,” a spokesperson told Music Business Worldwide —so we’ll have to wait for its official announcement to know if they’re real and when they will be implemented if that’s the case.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/spotify-looks-set-to-overhaul-its-royalty-model-next-year-081722667.html?src=rss
Elon Musk has been on a mission to transform X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) from what was once the world’s most successful microblogging platform into an “everything app”—a sort of one-stop shop of web services. In the course of this attempted transformation, Musk can brag of two primary accomplishments:…
Alexandra Witze reports via Nature: A meteorite that slammed into Mars in September 2021 has rewritten what scientists know about the planet’s interior. By analysing the seismic energy that vibrated through the planet after the impact, researchers have discovered a layer of molten rock that envelops Mars’s liquid-metal core. The finding, reported today in two papers in Nature, means that the Martian core is smaller than previously thought. It also resolves some lingering questions about how the red planet formed and evolved over billions of years.
The discovery comes from NASA’s InSight mission, which landed a craft with a seismometer on Mars’s surface. Between 2018 and 2022, that instrument detected hundreds of “marsquakes’ shaking the planet. In July 2021, on the basis of the mission’s observations of 11 quakes, researchers reported that the liquid core of Mars seemed to have a radius of around 1,830 kilometers3. That was bigger than many scientists were expecting. And it suggested that the core contained surprisingly high amounts of light chemical elements, such as sulfur, mixed with iron. But the September 2021 meteorite impact “unlocked everything,” says Henri Samuel, a geophysicist at the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris and lead author of one of today’s papers1. The meteorite struck the planet on the side opposite to where InSight was located. That’s much more distant than the marsquakes that InSight had previously studied, and allowed the probe to detect seismic energy traveling all the way through the Martian core4. “We were so excited,” says Jessica Irving, a seismologist at the University of Bristol, UK, and a co-author of Samuel’s paper.
For Samuel, it was an opportunity to test his idea that a molten layer of rock surrounds Mars’s core5. The way the seismic energy traversed the planet showed that what scientists had thought was the boundary between the liquid core and the solid mantle, 1,830 kilometers from the planet’s centre, was actually a different boundary between liquid and solid. It was the top of the newfound layer of molten rock meeting the mantle (see ‘Rethinking the Martian core’). The actual core is buried beneath that molten-rock layer and has a radius of only 1,650 kilometers, Samuel says. The revised core size solves some puzzles. It means that the Martian core doesn’t have to contain high amounts of light elements — a better match to laboratory and theoretical estimates. A second liquid layer inside the planet also meshes better with other evidence, such as how Mars responds to being deformed by the gravitational tug of its moon Phobos.
The second paper in Nature today2, from a team independent of Samuel’s, agrees that Mars’s core is enveloped by a layer of molten rock, but estimates that the core has a radius of 1,675 kilometers. The work analyzed seismic waves from the same distant meteorite impact, as well as simulations of the properties of mixtures of molten elements such as iron, nickel and sulfur at the high pressures and temperatures in the Martian core. Having molten rock right up against molten iron “appears to be unique,” says lead author Amir Khan, a geophysicist at ETH Zurich. “You have this peculiarity of liquid-liquid layering, which is something that doesn’t exist on the Earth.” The molten-rock layer might be left over from a magma ocean that once covered Mars. As it cooled and solidified into rock, the magma would have left behind a deep layer of radioactive elements that still release heat and keep rock molten at the base of the mantle, Samuel says.
Terminal GPT (tgpt) is a cross-platform command-line interface (CLI) tool that allows you to use ChatGPT 3.5 in your terminal without needing API keys. This is free software written in Go.
Ford has called its 20,000 employees back to work now that it has reached a tentative agreement with the United Auto Workers (UAW). The two parties have agreed on a new four-year labor contract that include a 25 percent pay increase for employees over that period, according to Reuters and The New York Times. With the cost-of-living wage adjustments the union has also successfully negotiated, the total pay hikes would amount to 33 percent, the UAW said. In addition to a wage hike, the contract also has stipulations for higher pensions and the right to strike over company plans to close factories.
Based on those rates, the highest-paid employees at Ford will ultimately be earning more than $40 an hour, up from $32, and have a base pay of $83,000 for a 40-hour-a-week workload. Meanwhile, recent hires will see their pay double over the next four years. As The Times notes, Ford initially offered to pay its workers 23 percent more, telling the union that it’s what the company could afford without making big changes to its business. However, the UAW pushed for a bigger percentage and managed to reach this agreement with Ford by having thousands of its workers walk out over the past few weeks.
Approximately 8,700 personnel at the company’s largest truck plant in Kentucky had stopped working, along with another 10,000 in Illinois and Michigan. Around two weeks after the strikes began, Ford suspended the construction of a Michigan battery factory for electric vehicles “until [it’s] confident about [its] ability to competitively operate the plant.”
Ford, like other automakers, are taking steps to electrify its fleet in hopes of having an all electric vehicle lineup over the next 10 years or so. The automakers affected by the strike, which also include GM and Stellantis, previously said that their electrification efforts currently costing them billions of dollars would be affected by the union’s demands. “Toyota, Honda, Tesla and the others are loving the strike, because they know the longer it goes on, the better it is for them,” Ford executive chairman William C. Ford Jr. said. Tesla and the Japanese automakers aren’t unionized, but the UAW argued that its success with the current strikes could give it the momentum it needs to expand and organize at other companies.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ford-reaches-a-tentative-agreement-with-striking-auto-workers-052421002.html?src=rss
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Egbert Edelbroek was acting as a sperm donor when he first wondered whether it’s possible to have babies in space. Curious about the various ways that donated sperm can be used, Edelbroek, a Dutch entrepreneur, began to speculate on whether in vitro fertilization technology was possible beyond Earth — or could even be improved by the conditions found there. Could the weightlessness of space be better than a flat laboratory petri dish? Now Edelbroek is CEO of SpaceBorn United, a biotech startup seeking to pioneer the study of human reproduction away from Earth. Next year, he plans to send a mini lab on a rocket into low Earth orbit, where in vitro fertilization, or IVF, will take place. If it succeeds, Edelbroek hopes his work could pave the way for future space settlements.
“Humanity needs a backup plan,” he says. “If you want to be a sustainable species, you want to be a multiplanetary species.” Beyond future space colonies, there is also a more pressing need to understand the effects of space on the human reproductive system. No one has ever become pregnant in space — yet. But with the rise of space tourism, it’s likely that it will eventually happen one day. Edelbroek thinks we should be prepared. Despite the burgeoning interest in deep space exploration and settlement, prompted in part by billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, we still know very little about what happens to our reproductive biology when we’re in orbit. A report released in September by the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine points out that almost no research has been done on human reproduction in space, adding that our understanding of how space affects reproduction is “vital to long-term space exploration, but largely unexplored to date.”
Some studies on animals have suggested that the various stages of reproduction — from mating and fertilization to embryo development, implantation, pregnancy, and birth — can function normally in space. For example, in the very first such experiment, eight Japanese medaka fish developed from egg to hatchling aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1994. All eight survived the return to Earth and seemed to behave normally.Yet other studies have found evidence that points to potential problems. Pregnant rats that spent much of their third trimester — a total of five days — on a Soviet satellite in 1983 experienced complications during labor and delivery. Like all astronauts returning to Earth, the rats were exhausted and weak. Their deliveries lasted longer than usual, likely because of atrophied uterine muscles. All the pups in one of the litters died during delivery, the result of an obstruction thought to be due in part to the mother’s weakened state.
To Edelbroek, these inconclusive results point to a need to systematically isolate each step in the reproductive process in order to better understand how it is affected by conditions like lower gravity and higher radiation exposure. The mini lab his company developed is designed to do exactly that. It is about the size of a shoebox and uses microfluidics to connect a chamber containing sperm to a chamber containing an egg. It can also rotate at different speeds to replicate the gravitational environment of Earth, the moon, or Mars. It is small enough to fit inside a capsule that can be housed on top of a rocket and launched into space.After the egg has been fertilized in the device, it splits into two cells, each of which divides again to form four cells and so on. After five to six days, the embryo reaches a stage known as a blastocyst, which looks like a hollow ball. At this point, the embryos in the mini lab will be cryogenically frozen for their return to Earth.
The Norwegian Volkswagen importer Moller Mobility Group has confirmed that it will stop selling combustion vehicles in Norway from 2024. Electricdrive.com reports: The farewell to the combustion engine in Norway is only logical: already today, e-cars regularly account for more than 80 percent of new registrations in the Scandinavian country, and the government wants them to reach a full 100 per cent by 2025. “It may seem strange to celebrate the milestone by removing model icons from our portfolio, but this has been an ambitious and important initiative over time,” says Ulf Tore Hekneby, managing director of Volkswagen importer Harald A. Moller AS. “The goal has been to drive change that we believe is of critical importance.”
Harald A. Moller AS has been importing Volkswagens to Norway since 1948. According to the company, around 1.1 million VWs have been sold in the Scandinavian country during these 75 years. This includes a total of 102,000 electric cars in the past ten years. The sale of the last Golf in Norway this December marks the end of an era, but also the beginning of a new one, Hekneby emphasised. “We encourage everyone to consider an electric car in their next car purchase. Switching to an electric car is a crucial step in reducing an individual’s carbon footprint and an important overall contribution to combating climate change,” he said. The top-selling car in the country is the Tesla Model Y, “dominating more than 20% of the market share with 15,452 units sold in the first half of this year,” reports Electrek. “Almost one in four new passenger car registrations so far this year was Tesla Model Y.”
