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Your WIRED daily briefing. Today, SpaceX hopes to recover the second-stage rocket from its first Falcon Heavy launch, 2016 saw a record number of drone incidents in the UK, a new doomsday vault for data has been opened and more.
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SpaceX's next class of rocket, the large-payload Falcon Heavy, could see the company attempting to land its upper stage when it's tested later this year (TechCrunch). The first stage of the Falcon Heavy will use Falcon 9 rocket boosters, which SpaceX has a proven track record of bringing back to Earth, while its second stage will use a Merlin 1D engine, built to function in a vacuum. Ultimately, SpaceX plans to regularly recover and reuse both stages, but for now, the company is simply hoping for a proof of concept. Elon Musk tweeted: "Considering trying to bring upper stage back on Falcon Heavy demo flight for full reusability. Odds of success low, but maybe worth a shot."
The growing accessibility of personal drones has led to a significant increase in police reports involving unmanned aerial vehicles across the UK, as well as new privacy concerns (The Guardian). Freedom of information requests made by the Press Association indicate that 2016 saw 3,456 drone incidents reported to police, compared to 1,237 in 2015 and just 283 in 2014. The incidents range from drones being used to smuggle contraband into prisons to complaints of a neighbour flying a camera drone over a garden where teenagers were sunbathing. Prof David H Dunn of Birmingham University said: "Previously you had a hedge, you had a wall and you could do whatever you wanted in your garden without people disturbing you. That has changed because of drones."
The Arctic World Archive, a doomsday vault designed to preserve the world's most valuable data, has opened in the same mountain in Svalbard that houses the Global Seed Vault in Norway (Gizmodo). Norwegian firm Piql is responsible for converting and storing submitted data onto photosensitive analogue film. Countries can upload video, audio, image and text content to be converted and added to the archive. So far, the national archives of Mexico and Brazil are stored in the far north, including national constitutions and historic documents dating as far back as the Inca period, but the team says that any kind of data, from scientific and engineering documents to literature, can be deposited.
The UK's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), an agency funded by the Ministry of Defence that produces scientific solutions for data and tech problems faced by the armed forces, is aiming to tap into machine learning talent (WIRED). To do this, DSTL has launched its first data science challenge. The challenge is aimed at startups, recent graduates and others working in computer science and has an overall prize pot of £40,000 – with £20,000 allocated for the winners. Capability advisor Leo Borrett says DSTL has decided to create the challenge based on its need to have technologies and partners that are able to "solve our exploitation of information to inform decision making". The first task is based on classifying documents based on their topics and the second task, which is arguably harder to crack, involves classifying vehicles in satellite images.
A study by British and Japanese researchers has revealed the unique nature of mosquito flight (Ars Technica). The team's work, including video illustrations shows that the insects use two methods of generating lift seen nowhere else in the animal world. Like other insects, mosquitoes' wings generate a leading edge vortex on their downstroke, but - uniquely - they also create lift via a trailing edge vortex generated by the upstroke of the wing. Finally, at the top of a stroke, the mosquito's wings begin to rotate, a motion that continues through a large part of the high-speed downstroke, generating a low pressure area above the wing for an unusually extended period, and creating lift in the process.
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A team from Birmingham University's Institute of Forest Research has turned a Staffordshire forest into a model of our environmental future (BBC News). The fenced-off area of woodland is surrounded by 25-metre masts pouring out carbon dioxide, effectively creating a real-world model of the levels of the gas that are expected to be found in the atmosphere by the middle of this century. The team hopes to find out how trees will cope with our changing climate and whether there is a limit to their ability to take up, store and use CO2. Lead researcher Professor Rob Mackenzie told BBC News: "We are confident that trees will continue to take in more CO2, though we are quite sure that there will be other things that will start to limit that. Rising temperatures will (also) change the ability of plants (to absorb CO2) - they are adapted to current temperatures."
Gloomy predictions abound that the applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning will put huge numbers of people out of work in the coming years (WIRED). But the corollary is that these technologies create opportunities to develop new goods and services that will bring new jobs. What's certain is that advanced implementations of computer science are beginning to disrupt our lives. We must start thinking about how these technologies are applied and regulated if we are to reap the benefits and minimise potential harms. WIRED peers into our algorithmic future.
Gaming peripheral maker Mad Catz has announced that it's going into bankruptcy, with all its assets to be liquidated to pay off its debts (Kotaku). The company is best known for its guitar controllers for Harmonix's Rock Band games, the highly customisable RAT range of gaming mice - acquired when it bought Saitek - and gaming headset subsidiary Tritton. The company was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange last week, as shares dropped to as little as $0.04 apiece.
Disney and Lego have put together a cute and eminently kid-friendly stop-motion Lego retelling of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (io9). The video, released to promote both Lego's various Star Wars kits and the home release of Rogue One is fun, if slightly annoyingly narrated. However, in its attempt to make the story of the film, which received a 12 rating in the UK (12A in cinemas), completely kid-friendly, the Lego rendition stops a little before the end so it can gloss over the small matter of planetary annihilation.
In a rare example of an actually-entertaining April Fool's joke, Adult Swim unexpectedly released the first episode of the long-awaited third season of animated sci-fi comedy Rick & Morty (Independent). Unfortunately, it's only officially available to viewers in selected countries, not including the UK. However, if you (or your VPN endpoint) are in the USA, you can watch back to back streams of the show, including the new season premier. The rest of us will, for now, have to content ourselves with a rather spectacular new Pokémon style Meeseeks battle video for the show and a teaser trailer for the full release of season three, due out this summer, with UK viewers able to watch on Netflix.
As a regular internet user, you’ve likely heard the terms “virtual private network” (VPN) and “proxy” before but may not understand what they are, if they're safe and how they differ. At its most simple, a VPN lets you connect to the web via a server run by a VPN provider. Data from everything you send, searches you make and websites you visit travel between your device and the VPN server and are encrypted. In particular, a VPN creates an encrypted connection between two points over a network, one being the user and the other being the VPN server (the termination point). This network can include something as relatively small as a person or company's private local area network (LAN), or the entire web.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
