Longtime Slashdot reader Randseed writes: Boeing Starliner is apparently still stuck at the ISS, six weeks longer than planned due to engine troubles. The root cause seems to be overheating. NASA is still hopeful that they can bring the two astronauts back on the Starliner, but if not apparently there is a SpaceX Dragon craft docked at the station that can get them home. This is another in a long list of high profile failures by Boeing. This comes after a series of failures in their popular commercial aircraft including undocumented flight system modifications causing crashes of the 737 MAX, doors blowing out in mid-flight, and parts falling off the aircraft. The latter decimated a Toyota in a populated area."I think we're starting to close in on those final pieces of flight rationale to make sure that we can come home safely, and that's our primary focus right now," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's commercial crew program.

"Our prime option is to complete the mission," Stich said. "There are a lot of good reasons to complete this mission and bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner. Starliner was designed, as a spacecraft, to have the crew in the cockpit."

joshuark shares a report from The Verge: NASA researchers have successfully tested laser communications in space by streaming 4K video footage originating from an airplane in the sky to the International Space Station and back. The feat demonstrates that the space agency could provide live coverage of a Moon landing during the Artemis missions and bodes well for the development of optical communications that could connect humans to Mars and beyond. NASA normally uses radio waves to send data and talk between the surface to space but says that laser communications using infrared light can transmit data 10 to 100 times faster than radios. "ISS astronauts, cosmonauts, and unwelcomed commercial space-flight visitors can now watch their favorite porn in real-time, adding some life to a boring zero-G existence," adds joshuark. "Ralph Kramden, when contacted by Ouiji board, simply spelled out 'Bang, zoom, straight to the moon!'"

Online education company 2U filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and is being taken private in a deal that will wipe out more than half of its $945 million debt [non-paywalled link]. From a report: 2U was a pioneer in the online education space, joining with schools including the University of Southern California, Georgetown University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to design and operate online courses in fields including nursing and social work. But it struggled in recent years amid new competition and changing regulations. It also had a highly leveraged balance sheet with looming loan-repayment deadlines. 2U closed Wednesday with a market value of about $11.5 million, down from more than $5 billion in 2018. In 2021, 2U bought edX, an online platform for classes that was founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The debt from that $800 million deal for edX proved debilitating to 2U, WSJ reports.

A NASA committee determined that the Chandra X-ray Observatory would have to cease operations under the proposed budget cuts in NASA's 2025 budget. The committee reviewed various options but found that only shutting down Chandra fit within the proposed budget, although alternatives could keep the observatory running with limited capabilities. SpaceNews reports: NASA established the Operations Paradigm Change Review (OPCR) committee this spring to look at ways of reducing the costs of operating Chandra and the Hubble Space Telescope as part of broader efforts to deal with a billion-dollar shortfall in agency science funding. The fiscal year 2025 budget proposal included a 40% cut in Chandra's budget, with further reductions through 2029, while cutting Hubble's budget by 10% in 2025. Astronomers strongly opposed the proposed cuts, particularly for Chandra. They argued that the reductions would effectively shut down the telescope, a conclusion backed by Patrick Slane, director of the Chandra X-Ray Center, in an open letter shortly after the release of the budget proposal.

The OPCR concurred. "The committee agreed that the continuation of a scientifically viable Chandra mission is not possible within the funding guidance," said Rob Kennicutt, an astronomer from the University of Arizona and Texas A&M University who served on the review committee, in a July 23 presentation at a meeting of the Astrophysics Advisory Committee, or APAC. "This is a serious threat to the observatory." Shutting down Chandra was one of four options presented to the OPCR by the Chandra team and the only one, he said, that fit within NASA's proposed budget profile. Three others would keep Chandra going with reduced capabilities and with budgets higher than what NASA proposed but below current levels. "We think it's possible to run Chandra for less money" than today, he said, "but more than what they were given."

"Despite its domestic space program faltering even before sanctions due to its invasion of Ukraine, and at least one very public failure on a less ambitious project, Russia has announced it will begin construction of a Russian-only replacement for the ISS and place it in a more difficult-to-access polar orbit," writes longtime Slashdot reader Baron_Yam. "Russia is motivated by military and political demands to achieve this, but whether it has the means or not seems uncertain at best." Reuters reports: Russia is aiming to create the four-module core of its planned new orbital space station by 2030, its Roscosmos space agency said on Tuesday. The head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, signed off on the timetable with the directors of 19 enterprises involved in creating the new station. The agency confirmed plans to launch an initial scientific and energy module in 2027. It said three more modules would be added by 2030 and a further two between 2031 and 2033. [...]

Apart from the design and manufacture of the modules, Roscomos said the schedule approved by Borisov includes flight-testing a new-generation crewed spacecraft and building rockets and ground-based infrastructure. The new station will enable Russia to "solve problems of scientific and technological development, national economy and national security that are not available on the Russian segment of the ISS due to technological limitations and the terms of international agreements," it said.

"Anyone who is into gaming knows your graphics card is under strain trying to display modern graphics," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "This results in increased power usage, which is then turned into heat. Keeping your card cool is a must to get the best performance possible."

"However, hardware tester Igor's Lab found that vendors for Nvidia RTX 40-series cards are using cheap, poorly applied thermal paste, which is leading to high temperatures and consequently, performance degradation over time. This penny-pinching has been confirmed by Nick Evanson at PC Gamer." From the report: I have four RTX 40-series cards in my office (RTX 4080 Super, 4070 Ti, and two 4070s) and all of them have quite high hotspots -- the highest temperature recorded by an individual thermal sensor in the die. In the case of the 4080 Super, it's around 11 C higher than the average temperature of the chip. I took it apart to apply some decent quality thermal paste and discovered a similar situation to that found by Igor's Lab. In the space of a few months, the factory-applied paste had separated and spread out, leaving just an oily film behind, and a few patches of the thermal compound itself. I checked the other cards and found that they were all in a similar state.

Igor's Lab examined the thermal paste used on a brand-new RTX 4080 and found it to be quite thin in nature, due to large quantities of cheap silicone oil being used, along with zinc oxide filler. There was lots of ground aluminium oxide (the material that provides the actual thermal transfer) but it was quite coarse, leading to the paste separating quite easily. Removing the factory-installed paste from another RTX 4080 graphics card, Igor's Lab applied a more appropriate amount of a high-quality paste and discovered that it lowered the hotspot temperature by nearly 30 C.

An anonymous reader writes: Windows users are being notified that their systems aren't backed up with the built-in Windows backup solution. A corresponding message appears with the advice that it's best to make backups so that all data is stored "in case something happens to the PC." It almost reads like an indirect threat, but Microsoft is actually just pointing out the option to store file backups on its own OneDrive cloud service. And it's also advertising more storage space.

In April the U.S. Space Force began testing "a new ground-based satellite jamming weapon to help keep U.S. military personnel safe from potential 'space-enabled' attacks" (according to a report from Space.com). The weapon was "designed to deny, degrade, or disrupt communications with satellites overhead, typically through overloading specific portions of the electromagnetic spectrum with interference," according to the article, with the miitary describing it as a small form-factor system "designed to be fielded in large numbers at low-cost and operated remotely" and "provide counterspace electronic warfare capability to all of the new Space Force components globally."

And now, Bloomberg reports that the U.S. is about to deploy them: The devices aren't meant to protect U.S. satellites from Chinese or Russian jamming but "to responsibly counter adversary satellite communications capabilities that enable attacks," the Space Force said in a statement to Bloomberg News. The Pentagon strives — on the rare occasions when it discusses such space capabilities — to distinguish its emerging satellite-jamming technology as purely defensive and narrowly focused. That's as opposed to a nuclear weapon the U.S. says Russia is developing that could create high-altitude electromagnetic pulses that would take out satellites and disrupt entire communications networks.

The first 11 of 24 Remote Modular Terminal jammers will be deployed in several months, and all of them could be in place by Dec. 31 at undisclosed locations, according to the Space Force statement... The new terminals augment a much larger jamming weapon called the Counter Communications System that's already deployed and a mid-sized one called Meadowlands "by providing the ability to have a proliferated, remotely controlled and relatively relocatable capability," the Space Force said. The Meadowlands system has encountered technical challenges that have delayed its delivery until at least October, about two years later than planned.

China has "hundreds and hundreds of satellites on orbit designed to find, fix, track, target and yes, potentially engage, US and allied forces across the Indo-Pacific," General Stephen Whiting, head of US Space Command, said Wednesday at the annual Aspen Security Forum. "So we've got to understand that and know what it means for our forces."
Bloomberg also got this comment from the chief director of space security and stability at the Secure World Foundation (which produces reports on counterspace weapons). The new U.S. Space Force jamming weapons are "reversible, temporary, non-escalatory and allow for plausible deniability in terms of who the instigator is."

A solar superstorm in May caused thousands of satellites to simultaneously maneuver to maintain altitude due to the thickening of the upper atmosphere, creating potential collision hazards as existing prediction systems struggled to cope. Space.com reports: According to a pre-print paper published on the online repository arXiv on June 12, satellites and space debris objects in low Earth orbit -- the region of space up to an altitude of 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) -- were sinking toward the planet at the speed of 590 feet (180 meters) per day during the four-day storm. To make up for the loss of altitude, thousands of spacecraft began firing their thrusters at the same time to climb back up. That mass movement, the authors of the paper point out, could have led to dangerous situations because collision avoidance systems didn't have time to calculate the satellites' changing paths.

The solar storm that battered Earth from May 7 to 10 reached the intensity of G5, the highest level on the five-step scale used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to assess the strength of solar storms. It was the strongest solar storm to hit Earth since 2003. The authors of the paper, however, pointed out that the environment around the planet has changed profoundly since that time. While only a few hundred satellites were orbiting Earth twenty years ago, there are thousands today. The authors of the paper put the number of "active payloads at [low Earth orbit]" at 10,000. [...] The new paper points out that space weather forecasts ahead of the May storm failed to accurately predict the duration and intensity of the event, making satellite collision predictions nearly impossible.

On the upside, the storm helped to clear out some junk as defunct satellites and debris fragments spiraled deeper into the atmosphere. The authors of the report estimate that thousands of space debris objects lost several kilometers in altitude during the storm. More powerful solar storms can be expected in the coming months as the peak of the current solar cycle -- the 11-year ebb and flow in the number of sunspots, solar flares and eruptions -- is expected in late 2024 and early 2025. The paper can be found here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The U.S. will fall behind in the artificial intelligence race if it does not embrace natural gas to help meet surging electricity demand from data centers, the CEO of one of the nation's largest pipeline operators told CNBC. "The only way we're going to be able to keep up with the kind of power demand and the electrification that's already afoot is natural gas," Williams Companies CEO Alan Armstrong said in an interview Thursday. "If we deny ourselves that we're going to fall behind in the AI race." Williams Companies handles about one-third of the natural gas in the U.S. through a pipeline network that spans more than 30,000 miles. Williams' network includes the 10,000 mile Transcontinental Pipeline, or Transco, a crucial artery that serves virtually the entire eastern seaboard including Virginia, the world's largest data center hub, and fast growing Southeast markets such as Georgia.

The tech sector's expansion of data centers to support AI and the adoption of electric vehicles is projected to add 290 terawatt hours of electricity demand by the end of the decade in the U.S., according to a recent report by the energy consulting firm Rystad. This load growth is equivalent to the entire electricity demand of Turkey, the world's 18th largest economy. Executives at some the nation's largest utilities have warned that failure to meet this surging electricity demand will jeopardize not just the artificial intelligence revolution, but economic growth across the board in the U.S. The role natural gas in helping to meet that demand is controversial as the country is simultaneously trying to transition to a clean energy economy through the rapid expansion of renewables. "We are going to run right up against a brick wall here and pretty quickly in terms of not having enough power available to do what we want to do on the AI side," Armstrong said. "I actually see this as a huge national security issue," the CEO said. "We're going to have to get out of our own way or we're going to accidentally keep ourselves from being the power we can be in the AI space."

"Those groups that have very much had their brand be all green have come to us and said, 'We got to work with you guys. We've run out of alternatives -- we can't meet the needs of our customers without using natural gas,'" Armstrong said. "We're completely out of capacity ourselves," Armstrong added. "So we just have to kind of beg, borrow and steal from other people's capacity to do our best to make gas available."

Bangladesh is experiencing a "near-total" nationwide internet shutdown amid government efforts to control widespread student protests against the country's quota system for government jobs. The country's quota system requires a third of government jobs be reserved for relatives of veterans who had fought for independence from Pakistan.

According to Reuters, the protests "have opened old and sensitive political fault lines between those who fought for Bangladesh's independence from Pakistan in 1971 and those accused of collaborating with Islamabad." Analysts say the protests have also been "fueled by high unemployment among young people" and "wider economic woes, such as high inflation and shrinking reserves of foreign exchange." Engadget reports on the internet disruptions: To control the situation, Bangladeshi authorities shut down internet and phone access throughout the country, a common practice in South Asia to prevent the spread of rumors and misinformation and exercise state control. NetBlocks, a global internet monitor that works on digital rights analyzed live network data that showed that Bangladesh was in the middle of a "near-total national internet shutdown." [...]

Bangladesh has frequently blacked out the internet to crack down on political opposition and activists. At the end of 2023, research tool CIVICUS Monitor, which provides data on the state of civil society and freedoms in nearly 200 countries, downgraded Bangladesh's civic space to "closed," its lowest possible rating, after the country imposed six internet shutdowns the previous year. That made Bangladesh the fifth-largest perpetrator of internet shutdowns in 2022, Access Now said.

The country's telecom regulator had pledged to keep internet access on through Bangladesh's general elections at the beginning of 2024, but that electoral period is now over. Despite the pledge, Bangladesh blocked access to news websites during its elections.

AMD has introduced its latest Ryzen AI chips, built on the new Zen 5 architecture, in an ambitious attempt to compete with Apple's dominant MacBook processors. During a recent two-day event in Los Angeles, the company made bold claims about outperforming Apple's M3 and M3 Pro chips in various tasks including multitasking, image processing, and gaming, though these assertions remain unverified due to limited demonstrations and benchmarks provided at the event, The Verge reports. The report adds: At that event, I heard AMD brag about beating the MacBook more than I've ever heard a company directly target a competitor before. AMD claimed its new Ryzen chip "exceeds the performance of what MacBook Air has to offer in multitasking, image processing, 3D rendering, and gaming"; "is 15 percent faster than the M3 Pro" in Cinebench; and is capable of powering up to four displays, "unlike the MacBook Air, which limits you to two displays only." While AMD touted significant improvements in CPU architecture, graphics performance, and AI capabilities, journalists present at the event were unable to fully test or validate these features, leaving many questions unanswered about the chips' real-world performance.

The company's reluctance or inability to showcase certain capabilities, particularly in gaming and AI applications, has raised eyebrows among industry observers, the report adds. The new Ryzen AI chips are scheduled to debut in Asus laptops on July 28th, marking a critical juncture for AMD in the fiercely competitive laptop processor market. As Apple's M-series chips and Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors continue to gain traction in the mobile computing space, the success or failure of AMD's latest offering could have far-reaching implications for the future of x86 architecture in laptops.

Nvidia is ready to fully transition to open-source Linux GPU kernel drivers, starting with the R555 series and planning a complete shift with the R560 series. The open-source kernel modules will only be available for select newer GPUs, while older architectures like Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta must continue using proprietary drivers. TechSpot reports: According to Nvidia, the open-source GPU kernel modules have helped deliver "equivalent or better" application performance compared to its proprietary kernels. The company has also added new features like Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support, confidential computing, and the coherent memory architectures of the Grace platform to its open-source kernels. [...] For compatible GPUs, the default version of the driver installed by all methods is switching from proprietary to open-source. However, users will have the ability to manually select the closed-source modules if they are still available for their platform.

Unfortunately, the open-source kernel modules are not available for GPUs from the older Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures, meaning people still running a GTX 980 or GTX 1080 will have to continue using Nvidia's proprietary drivers. For mixed deployments with older and newer GPUs in the same system, Nvidia recommends continuing to use the proprietary driver for full compatibility. "Nvidia has moved most of its proprietary functions into a proprietary, closed-source firmware blob," adds Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy. "The parts of Nvidia's GPUs that interact with the broader Linux system are open, but the user-space drivers and firmware are none of your or the OSS community's business."

Astronomers say they've detected two gases that could indicate the presence of life forms lurking in the clouds of Venus. The Guardian reports: Findings presented at the national astronomy meeting in Hull on Wednesday bolster evidence for a pungent gas, phosphine, whose presence on Venus has been fiercely disputed. A separate team revealed the tentative detection of ammonia, which on Earth is primarily produced by biological activity and industrial processes, and whose presence on Venus scientists said could not readily be explained by known atmospheric or geological phenomena. "It could be that if Venus went through a warm, wet phase in the past then as runaway global warming took effect [life] would have evolved to survive in the only niche left to it -- the clouds," said Dr Dave Clements, a reader in astrophysics at Imperial College London, told the meeting. "Our findings suggest that when the atmosphere is bathed in sunlight the phosphine is destroyed," Clements said. "All that we can say is that phosphine is there. We don't know what's producing it. It may be chemistry that we don't understand. Or possibly life."

In a second talk, Prof Jane Greaves, an astronomer at Cardiff University, presented preliminary observations from the Green Bank telescope indicating ammonia, which on Earth is made through either industrial processes or by nitrogen-converting bacteria. Greaves said: "Even if we confirmed both of these [findings], it is not evidence that we have found these magic microbes and they're living there today," adding that there were not yet "any ground truths." Dr Robert Massey, the deputy executive director at the Royal Astronomical Society, said in a statement: "These are very exciting findings but it must be stressed that the results are only preliminary and more work is needed to learn more about the presence of these two potential biomarkers in Venus's clouds. Nevertheless, it is fascinating to think that these detections could point to either possible signs of life or some unknown chemical processes. It will be interesting to see what further investigations unearth over the coming months and years."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: CNBC spoke to three startups -- France-based Zephalto, Florida-based Space Perspective and Arizona-based World View -- that aim to hoist tourists to the stratosphere using pressurized capsules and massive gas-filled balloons. "The capsule itself is designed to to carry eight customers and two crew into the stratosphere," said Ryan Hartman, CEO of World View. "There will be a center bar where people can gather, and then, of course, there will be a bathroom aboard the capsule." The balloon rides will last around 6 hours, but will not take passengers all the way to space. Most will reach heights of 15 to 19 miles above the earth's surface, flying in an area known as the stratosphere. The start of space is generally accepted by the U.S. government to be around 80 kilometers, or about 50 miles, above the earth's surface.

Jane Poynter, founder and co-CEO of Space Perspective, has a differing view. "There is no universal definition of space," Poynter said. "We are regulated as a spaceship. If we go over 98,000 feet, we are a spaceship. Outside the capsule, it's essentially a vacuum. We're above 99% of Earth's atmosphere, which is why the sky is so deep black." Compared to rocket-powered space tourism, the physical sensation that passengers will experience on a stratospheric balloon ride is more comparable to being on an airplane. Passengers will not experience weightlessness. "We don't need any physical requirements to board the balloon," said Vincent Farret d'Asties, the founder and chief pilot at Zephalto. "If you can board a standard plane, you can board the balloon."

All three companies told CNBC that they were pleased with consumer interest. World Views says it sold 1,250 tickets so far while Space Perspective has sold 1,800. Zephalto did not tell CNBC how many tickets it sold, but said its initial flights were fully booked. Ticket prices range from $50,000 per seat with World View to around $184,000 with Zephalto. Space Perspective sells tickets to its experience for $125,000 per seat. That's all assuming commercial service gets off the ground. Only Zephalto has performed crewed tests so far, though not at the company's target altitude of about 15 miles above the earth's surface.

Robin McKie writes via The Guardian: Scientists with Breakthrough Listen, the world's largest scientific research program dedicated to finding alien civilizations, say a host of technological developments are about to transform the search for intelligent life in the cosmos. These innovations will be outlined at the group's annual conference, which is to be held in the UK for the first time, in Oxford, this week. Several hundred scientists, from astronomers to zoologists, are expected to attend. "There are amazing technologies that are under development, such as the construction of huge new telescopes in Chile, Africa and Australia, as well as developments in AI," said astronomer Steve Croft, a project scientist with Breakthrough Listen. "They are going to transform how we look for alien civilizations."

Among these new instruments are the Square Kilometer Array, made up of hundreds of radio telescopes now being built in South Africa and Australia, and the Vera Rubin Observatory that is being constructed in Chile. The former will become the world's most powerful radio astronomy facility while the latter, the world's largest camera, will be able to image the entire visible sky every three or four nights, and is expected to help discover millions of new galaxies and stars. Both facilities are set to start observations in the next few years and both will provide data for Breakthrough Listen. Using AI to analyze these vast streams of information for subtle patterns that would reveal evidence of intelligent life will give added power to the search for alien civilizations, added Croft.

"Until now, we have been restricted to looking for signals deliberately sent out by aliens to advertise their existence. The new techniques are going to be so sensitive that, for the first time, we will be able to detect unintentional transmissions as opposed to deliberate ones and will be able to spot alien airport radar, or powerful TV transmitters -- things like that." [...] Croft remains optimistic that we will soon succeed in making contact. "We know that the conditions for life are everywhere, we know that the ingredients for life are everywhere. I think it would be deeply weird if it turned out we were the only inhabited planet in the galaxy or in the universe. But you know, it's possible."

NASA: The stars above and on Earth aligned as an inspirational message and lyrics from the song "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)" by hip-hop artist Missy Elliott were beamed to Venus via NASA's DSN (Deep Space Network). The agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California sent the transmission at 10:05 a.m. PDT on Friday, July 12. As the largest and most sensitive telecommunication service of NASA's Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, the DSN has an array of giant radio antennas that allow missions to track, send commands, and receive scientific data from spacecraft venturing to the Moon and beyond. To date, the system has transmitted only one other song into space, making the transmission of Elliott's song a first for hip-hop and NASA.

"Both space exploration and Missy Elliott's art have been about pushing boundaries," said Brittany Brown, director, Digital and Technology Division, Office of Communications at NASA Headquarters in Washington, who initially pitched ideas to Missy's team to collaborate with the agency. "Missy has a track record of infusing space-centric storytelling and futuristic visuals in her music videos, so the opportunity to collaborate on something out of this world is truly fitting." The song traveled about 158 million miles (254 million kilometers) from Earth to Venus -- the artist's favorite planet. Transmitted at the speed of light, the radio frequency signal took nearly 14 minutes to reach the planet. The transmission was made by the 34-meter (112-foot) wide Deep Space Station 13 (DSS-13) radio dish antenna, located at the DSN's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, near Barstow in California. Coincidentally, the DSS-13 also is nicknamed Venus.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, is reportedly in advanced negotiations to acquire cloud security startup Wiz for approximately $23 billion, Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. The potential deal, which would value Wiz at nearly double its most recent private valuation of $12 billion, underscores the growing importance of cybersecurity in Alphabet's enterprise strategy as it seeks to narrow the gap with cloud computing rivals such as Microsoft, Morgan Stanley said in a note.

Founded in January 2020, Wiz has quickly established itself as a leading player in the Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) space, utilizing an agentless approach to secure cloud application deployments throughout their lifecycle. The company's platform continuously assesses and prioritizes critical risks across various security domains, providing customers with a comprehensive view of their cloud security posture. Wiz has experienced rapid growth since its inception, with annual recurring revenue (ARR) exceeding $350 million as of January 2024, representing a year-over-year increase of over 75%. The company boasts an impressive client roster, with more than 40% of Fortune 100 companies among its customers, and has raised nearly $2 billion in funding to date.

If confirmed, the acquisition would mark Alphabet's largest to date, significantly expanding its footprint in the burgeoning cloud security market. The move follows previous security-focused acquisitions by the tech giant, including the $5.4 billion purchase of Mandiant in 2022 and the $500 million acquisition of Siemplify. Morgan Stanley adds that the potential acquisition could raise questions about Wiz's ability to maintain neutrality across multiple cloud platforms, potentially benefiting competitors such as Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike in the near term.

"In a significant advancement for space technology, a team of UC Berkeley researchers, led by doctoral student Taylor Waddell, successfully launched a 3D printer into space," reports the university's student newspaper: As part of the Virgin Galactic 07 mission, the team sent a 3D printer named SpaceCAL to space to explore the potential of Computed Axial Lithography, or CAL, and additive manufacturing in space... During its 140-second flight in suborbital space, the SpaceCAL printer autonomously detected microgravity and printed four test parts: two space shuttles and two Benchies, or 3D-printed boats created to check the printer's accuracy, according to Sean Chu, a member of the team who worked on designing structures and mechanisms. Within the 140 seconds, the process involved multiple steps such as printing, post-washing, flushing with water and post-curing with light to fully solidify the parts.
But that's just the beginning, says the university's engineering department: To date, CAL has shown that it can successfully print with more than 60 different materials on Earth, such as silicones, glass composites and biomaterials. According to Waddell, this versatility could come in handy for both the cabin and the crew... "CAL is also capable of repairing the crew. We can print dental replacements, skin grafts or lenses, or things personalized in emergency medicine for astronauts, which is very important in these missions, too."

Someday, CAL may be used to print even more sophisticated parts, such as human organs. Lawrence Livermore National Lab has received a grant from NASA to test this technology on the International Space Station. "They're going to basically do bioprinting on the Space Station," said Waddell. "And the long, long-term goal is to print organs up in space with CAL, then bring them back down to Earth." Next, Waddell and his colleagues hope to begin work with NASA on developing and validating a single object that could support crew health and wellness, like a dental crown for an astronaut or a surgical wound closure tool...

This project was made possible through a $1.4 million grant and engineering support provided by NASA. In addition, Virgin Galactic played a pivotal role in taking this project to the next level.

"The latest version of the Linux kernel adds an array of improvements," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu, " including a new memory sealing system call, a speed boost for AES-XTS encryption on Intel and AMD CPUs, and expanding Rust language support within the kernel to RISC-V." Plus, like in all kernel releases, there's a glut of groundwork to offer "initial support" for upcoming CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, Wi-Fi, and other hardware (that most of us don't use yet, but require Linux support to be in place for when devices that use them filter out)...

Linux 6.10 adds (after much gnashing) the mseal() system call to prevent changes being made to portions of the virtual address space. For now, this will mainly benefit Google Chrome, which plans to use it to harden its sandboxing. Work is underway by kernel contributors to allow other apps to benefit, though. A similarly initially-controversial change merged is a new memory-allocation profiling subsystem. This helps developers fine-tune memory usage and more readily identify memory leaks. An explainer from LWN summarizes it well.

Elsewhere, Linux 6.10 offers encrypted interactions with trusted platform modules (TPM) in order to "make the kernel's use of the TPM reasonably robust in the face of external snooping and packet alteration attacks". The documentation for this feature explains: "for every in-kernel operation we use null primary salted HMAC to protect the integrity [and] we use parameter encryption to protect key sealing and parameter decryption to protect key unsealing and random number generation." Sticking with security, the Linux kernel's Landlock security module can now apply policies to ioctl() calls (Input/Output Control), restricting potential misuse and improving overall system security.

On the networking side there's significant performance improvements to zero-copy send operations using io_uring, and the newly-added ability to "bundle" multiple buffers for send and receive operations also offers an uptick in performance...

A couple of months ago Canonical announced Ubuntu support for the RISC-V Milk-V Mars single-board computer. Linux 6.10 mainlines support for the Milk-V Mars, which will make that effort a lot more viable (especially with the Ubuntu 24.10 kernel likely to be v6.10 or newer). Others RISC-V improvements abound in Linux 6.10, including support for the Rust language, boot image compression in BZ2, LZ4, LZMA, LZO, and Zstandard (instead of only Gzip); and newer AMD GPUs thanks to kernel-mode FPU support in RISC-V.
Phoronix has their own rundown of Linux 6.10, plus a list of some of the highlights, which includes:

• The initial DRM Panic infrastructure
• The new Panthor DRM driver for newer Arm Mali graphics
• Better AMD ROCm/AMDKFD support for "small" Ryzen APUs and new additions for AMD Zen 5.
• AMD GPU display support on RISC-V hardware thanks to RISC-V kernel mode FPU
• More Intel Xe2 graphics preparations
• Better IO_uring zero-copy performance
• Faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption with modern Intel and AMD CPUs
• Continued online repair work for XFS
• Steam Deck IMU support
• TPM bus encryption and integrity protection