SpaceX says it successfully test-fired the booster for its next Starship launch, although that liftoff may still be weeks away. SpaceNews reports: SpaceX fired the Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster designated Booster 9 in a static-fire test at its Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas, at approximately 1:35 p.m. Eastern Aug. 25. SpaceX said it conducted a "full duration" firing, which appeared to last about five to six seconds. SpaceX later stated that all 33 engines successfully ignited, although two shut down prematurely. "Congratulations to the SpaceX team on this exciting milestone!"

The company did not state if that performance was sufficient for it to proceed with a launch attempt, but it was better than an earlier test of the same booster Aug. 6. That test ended early, after the engines fired for less than three seconds, with four of the Raptors shutting down prematurely. If SpaceX is satisfied with the outcome of the test, it is likely one of the final technical milestones before it is ready for a second integrated Starship/Super Heavy launch. The first, April 20, failed four minutes after liftoff when several Raptor engines in the Super Heavy booster shut down and vehicle later lost control and tumbled.

AMD on Friday announced its long-awaited middle members of the Radeon RX 7000 series, the Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT. From a report: Today, the company is finally filling in that gap with the new Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT, both advertised as 1440p graphics cards and available starting at $449 and $499, respectively. Both cards will be available on September 6. And most Radeon RX 6000 and RX 7000 GPUs sold between now and September 30 will come with a free copy of Bethesda's upcoming "Skyrim in space" title, Starfield.

The RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT are based on the same RDNA 3 graphics architecture as the other 7000-series GPUs, which means a more efficient manufacturing process than the RX 6000 series, DisplayPort 2.1 support, and hardware acceleration for encoding with the AV1 video codec, which promises game streamers either higher-quality video at the same bitrate as older codecs or the same quality with a lower bitrate. AMD compared the 7800 XT and 7700 XT favorably to Nvidia's $600 upper-midrange RTX 4070 and the $500 16GB version of the RTX 4060 Ti. The new Radeon cards also support FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) version 3, a new version of AMD's GPU-agnostic AI upscaling technology that also promises extra AI-generated frames a la Nvidia's proprietary DLSS 3 and DLSS Frame Generation feature. But unlike Nvidia, AMD isn't restricting FSR 3 to its latest cards, and users of RX 6000-series cards plus recent Nvidia GeForce and Intel Arc cards will be able to benefit, too, at least when games start supporting it.

Using data collected from the International Space Station (ISS), scientists found that a small yet growing percentage of tree leaves in tropical forests are approaching the maximum temperature threshold for leaves to photosynthesize," reports Live Science. If this trend continues, it could spell disaster for Earth's climate systems and biodiversity. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. From the report: The average critical temperature beyond which photosynthetic machinery in tropical trees begins to fail is 116 degrees Fahrenheit (46.7 degrees Celsius). Currently, only 0.01 % of all leaves surpass this critical temperature every year. But scientists warn that air temperature rises of 7.2 F (4 C) could push trees in tropical forests beyond a tipping point and into mass death. "It's concerning from our perspective that you see nonlinear trends. So you heat the air by, let's say, 2, 3 degrees Celsius [3.6 to 5.4 F], and the actual upper temperature of these leaves goes up by 8 degrees [Celsius; 14.4 F]," Christopher Doughty, an associate professor of ecoinformatics at Northern Arizona University, said during a press conference on Monday (Aug. 21). "Even though a small percentage of leaves are currently doing this, our best guess is that a 4 degrees Celsius increase in temperature could cause some serious issues for certain tropical forests." [...]

Plugging these peak temperatures into a mathematical model, the scientists found that an average 7 F (3.9 C) increase in the air temperature surrounding the leaves caused those most exposed to the heat to have their water-carrying stomata closed off by the tree, leading to their deaths. This triggered a cascade effect, increasing the temperature around the remaining leaves and potentially killing them, their branches and the trees in turn. "If you have 10% of the leaves dying, the whole branch is going to be warmer because a critical part of that branch can no longer cool the broader branch. Likewise you can make that assumption across the whole forest when a tree dies," Doughty said.

Dropbox, a provider of online data storage, is ending its unlimited option, saying a small handful of customers were using massive amounts of resources that had the potential to degrade the cloud service for the rest of its clients. From a report: The company's highest-tier "all the space you need" storage plan will be capped at about 5 terabytes per user for new customers, the company said in a blog post.

While the plan was designed for businesses, some clients were instead using it for cryptocurrency mining, pooling storage with strangers, or re-selling the cloud service, Dropbox said. These uses "frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers," the company said. [...] The change follows Alphabet's Google removing "as much storage as you need" product branding for its highest-tier Workspace plan in May, according to copies of its website hosted on the Wayback Machine.

Meta, intent on making a splash in a generative AI space rife with competition, is on something of an open source tear. From a report: Following the release of AI models for generating text, translating languages and creating audio, the company today open sourced Code Llama, a machine learning system that can generate and explain code in natural language -- specifically English. Akin to GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer, as well as open source AI-powered code generators like StarCoder, StableCode and PolyCoder, Code Llama can complete code and debug existing code across a range of programming languages, including Python, C++, Java, PHP, Typescript, C# and Bash.

"At Meta, we believe that AI models, but large language models for coding in particular, benefit most from an open approach, both in terms of innovation and safety," Meta wrote in a blog post shared with TechCrunch. "Publicly available, code-specific models can facilitate the development of new technologies that improve peoples' lives. By releasing code models like Code Llama, the entire community can evaluate their capabilities, identify issues and fix vulnerabilities." Code Llama, which is available in several flavors, including a version optimized for Python and a version fine-tuned to understand instructions (e.g. "Write me a function that outputs the fibonacci sequence"), is based on the Llama 2 text-generating model that Meta open sourced earlier this month. While Llama 2 could generate code, it wasn't necessarily good code -- certainly not up to the quality a purpose-built model like Copilot could produce.

samleecole shares a report from 404 Media, a new independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox: On the Discord server for Mage Space, a popular platform for creating AI-generated images, is a list of channels where members share adult content. There are channels for furries, hardcore and softcore porn, and anime. At the bottom of the list is a channel named "other-nsfw" which includes a few distinct erotic genres that don't fit neatly into any of the others. Mostly, it's gore, violence, and bizarre, in hyperrealistic erotic imagery entirely generated by AI. The images people create, and the long, meandering prompts they write, are a rich text that could offer a glimpse into where sexuality in the internet age is taking us next, and how we're steering it.

There's no shortage of fetish content on the internet, which might make the above statement sound ridiculous and unbelievable. Online, fetishists find their people and set to work making more of what they like, whether it's elaborate role-playing cosplays of themselves as sexy airplanes, blueberries, or slime monsters. Sometimes it pushes the bounds of the sane and legal: crush, fart, and scat porn all thrive online, and snuff films have been popular since before the internet existed. But with the rise in popularity of generative AI, and wildly popular sites like Mage.Space that let users generate anything they set their minds to, the limits are literally our own imaginations. With that power, people are wrangling images out of the AI that are on the edge of what's popular, let alone possible in the porn world. "This conversation we're having is literally on the edge of knowledge, nobody's writing about this in academia right now," Thomas Brooks, assistant professor of psychology at New Mexico Highlands University, told me. "Everybody's still kind of caught up in deepfakes. And they haven't quite grappled with generative AI yet." "You, as the individual porn consumer, can now create your own special little fantasy and your own technological, disembodied sexuality," said Brooks, in what he refers to as gamified pornography. "There's an internal motivation to solve the puzzle and get the prize. But then there's an external motivation of, 'can I come up with this crazy thing to show my anonymous internet friends.'"

"We're letting technology become mediators of our different psychosocial expressions," Brooks added.

India has become the first country to land a spacecraft on the moon's south pole. It launched Chandrayaan-3 in mid-July, with the spacecraft entering the moon's orbit on Aug. 5. Earlier this week, Russia crashed its Luna-25 rocket in the same lunar region. From a report: It's notoriously difficult to land a rover on the moon. Russia's Luna-25 crashed while making an attempt just this week, while Japanese company ispace failed to land an unmanned lander in April.â 1 Since the moon has no atmosphere, landers can't just softly touch down on the lunar surface. And, without GPS capabilities, scientists rely on the lander's computers to accurately identify where the spacecraft will touch down. India is only the fourth country to pull off a moon landing, behind the U.S., China, and Russia. The nation's lunar aspirations are part of a push by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to garner investments for private space exploration and satellite launches. Speaking at the rocket's launch in July, Modi heralded a "new chapter" in India's space program.

New York City, home to more than a million students in its school system, is the biggest school district in the U.S. -- and now allows any student to enroll virtually in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Time reports: Dubbed Virtual Innovators Academy, there are 17 teachers for about 200 students enrolled in the 2023-2024 school year for sophomore and freshman years. Each year, another grade level will be added, and the school's funding comes from the city and state, just like other public schools. Students meet in-person for required state exams and for monthly social gatherings like arcade games at Dave & Busters or seeing a Broadway show. But many of the most popular extracurriculars are done from home, says Virtual Innovators Academy principal Terri Grey, like esports and flying drones. [...]

And it isn't just in New York: school districts in Utah, Georgia, California, and elsewhere have also launched permanent virtual schools. Concerns remain about the effectiveness of virtual school. Critics worry about the lack of in-person social interaction during crucial developmental years, and about whether teachers can educate as effectively through a screen. But administrators behind the nation's burgeoning virtual schools say they have studied what works and what doesn't from remote-schooling during the pandemic when setting up these communities. Every morning, students at Virtual Innovators Academy meet in small groups with a teacher advisor to talk about how they're doing and give them time to wake up in the morning and connect with other classmates. There's less emphasis on multiple choice tests, which proved harder to administer online, and more emphasis on research projects.

"Too many people judge virtual instruction as if it were the emergency roadside online instruction that happened as a result of the pandemic," says Anthony Godfrey, who helps oversee the K-12 Jordan Virtual Learning Academy in Utah. "This is something very different. This is a carefully thought out, very intentional way of providing a unique and effective means of instruction." [...] But for all the proponents of virtual schooling, there are critics who worry about what's being lost behind the computer screen. [...] Unstructured, spontaneous conversations are often the most memorable parts of school, he argues; students might work side-by-side, help each other with homework, and also socialize in between classes. In virtual school, "How do you create space for bumping into somebody in the hall?" [wonders Nathan Holbert, a researcher at Teachers College, Columbia University, who studies virtual learning]. "I don't know that you can."

A piece of space debris being monitored by the European Space Agency as part of a mission to remove trash from space was hit by another piece of debris, splintering the object into more pieces. From a report: ESA confirmed Tuesday that the US's 18th Space Defense Squadron, which tracks objects in orbit, spotted a number of new pieces in the vicinity of a payload adapter named VESPA that the agency had planned to pluck from space. The most likely cause of those new fragments is "the hypervelocity impact of a small, untracked object" ramming into VESPA, according to ESA. VESPA was left over from the launch of a European Vega rocket that took off from South America in 2013. It was part of a cone-shaped attachment used to deploy the rocket's satellite into orbit, and has been in Earth's orbit ever since. ESA said its new fragments don't pose much of a risk to any other spacecraft at the moment.

Under a new initiative, named Bandwagon, SpaceX is expanding its rideshare program to cater to the demand for launches to mid-inclination orbits. TechCrunch reports: Orbital inclination refers to what part of the Earth is visible to a satellite as it rotates around the planet. A satellite in an equatorial orbit is at 0 degrees inclination; a satellite in a sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) is slightly higher than 90 degrees; and a mid-inclination orbit is around 45 degrees. Currently, SpaceX offers rideshare services on the Falcon 9 rocket to SSO through the Transporter program, which is in notoriously high demand. But mid-inclination orbits (MIOs) are appealing to a growing number of customers, especially to remote sensing companies that want to strengthen their coverage over areas like parts of Asia and the Middle East. Right now, companies must often purchase a dedicated launch from Rocket Lab if they want to position a satellite in MIO.

With the new rideshare program, called Bandwagon, SpaceX is going after this slice of the market. According to SpaceX's website, it currently has two Bandwagon missions booked for 2024 and two for 2025. If they become even close to the popularity of the Rideshare program, they could be a major threat to all other small launch providers: According to Jarrod McLachlan, director of rideshare sales at SpaceX, who spoke at the industry conference, SpaceX has delivered 682 spacecraft to orbit to date via rideshare missions.

An anonymous reader shares a column: You can still do a clean install of Windows, and it's arguably easier than ever, with official Microsoft-sanctioned install media easily accessible and Windows Update capable of grabbing most of the drivers that most computers need for basic functionality. The problem is that a "clean install" doesn't feel as clean as it used to, and unfortunately for us, it's an inside job -- it's Microsoft, not third parties, that is primarily responsible for the pile of unwanted software and services you need to decline or clear away every time you do a new Windows install.

The "out-of-box experience" (OOBE, in Microsoft parlance) for Windows 7 walked users through the process of creating a local user account, naming their computer, entering a product key, creating a "Homegroup" (a since-discontinued local file- and media-sharing mechanism), and determining how Windows Update worked. Once Windows booted to the desktop, you'd find apps like Internet Explorer and the typical in-box Windows apps (Notepad, Paint, Calculator, Media Player, Wordpad, and a few other things) installed. Keeping that baseline in mind, here's everything that happens during the OOBE stage in a clean install of Windows 11 22H2 (either Home or Pro) if you don't have active Microsoft 365/OneDrive/Game Pass subscriptions tied to your Microsoft account:

(Mostly) mandatory Microsoft account sign-in.
Setup screen asking you about data collection and telemetry settings.
A (skippable) screen asking you to "customize your experience."
A prompt to pair your phone with your PC.
A Microsoft 365 trial offer.
A 100GB OneDrive offer.
A $1 introductory PC Game Pass offer.

This process is annoying enough the first time, but at some point down the line, you'll also be offered what Microsoft calls the "second chance out-of-box experience," or SCOOBE (not a joke), which will try to get you to do all of this stuff again if you skipped some of it the first time. This also doesn't account for the numerous one-off post-install notification messages you'll see on the desktop for OneDrive and Microsoft 365. (And it's not just new installs; I have seen these notifications appear on systems that have been running for months even if they're not signed in to a Microsoft account, so no one is safe). And the Windows desktop, taskbar, and Start menu are no longer the pristine places they once were. Due to the Microsoft Store, you'll find several third-party apps taking up a ton of space in your Start menu by default, even if they aren't technically downloaded and installed until you run them for the first time. Spotify, Disney+, Prime Video, Netflix, and Facebook Messenger all need to be removed if you don't want them (this list can vary a bit over time).

LiveScience brings an update on China's Chang'e-4 — the first spacecraft to ever land on the far side of the moon.

Its Lunar Penetrating Radar has now mapped the lunar subsurface "in finer detail than ever before" by bouncing radio signals deep underground: Their results, which were published Aug. 7 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, reveal billions of years of previously hidden lunar history. These new data suggest the top 130 feet of the lunar surface are made up of multiple layers of dust, soil, and broken rocks, said lead study author Jianqing Feng, an astrogeological researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona... Farther down, the scientists discovered five distinct layers of lunar lava that seeped across the landscape billions of years ago.

Scientists think our moon formed 4.51 billion years ago, not long after the solar system itself, when a Mars-size object slammed into Earth and broke off a chunk of our planet The moon then continued to be bombarded by objects from space for roughly 200 million years. Some impacts cracked the moon's surface. Like Earth, the moon's mantle at that time contained pockets of molten material called magma, which seeped out through the newly formed cracks in a series of volcanic eruptions, Feng said.

The new data from Chang'e-4 shows that process slowing down over time: Feng and his colleagues found that the layers of volcanic rock grew thinner the closer they were to the moon's surface. This suggests that less lava flowed in later eruptions compared with earlier ones. "[The moon] was slowly cooling down and running out of steam in its later volcanic stage," Feng said. "Its energy became weak over time...."

However, there could still be magma deep underneath the lunar surface, Feng said.

The "vast majority of battery-powered and hybrid cars" don't have a spare tire, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Honda told one complaining customer that "if the vehicle is in an accident, the spare tire can cause damage to the electric battery which could cause a failure in the battery." But according to the Times, "car design experts said that explanation was plausible but far-fetched." There's a simpler explanation for the move away from spare tires: They're too big and heavy, and people don't really need them anymore... Car manufacturers have been ridding their sedans and smaller SUVs of full-sized spares for some time. In 2018, Consumer Reports said, 60% of the vehicles it had tested over the previous five years came with small-sized temporary tires ("doughnuts"), and only 10% came with full-sized spares... The best-selling models of electric sedans and SUVs — Teslas, the Chevy Bolt, the Volkswagen ID.4, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, the Hyundai Ioniq 5, the BMW i4 and the Mercedes EQS — have no spare of any kind, even if they come with a premium price tag. Ditto for hybrids; the Toyota Prius, for example, hasn't included a spare since 2016.

That's not because people magically stopped having flat tires. U.S. drivers suffer 94 million flat tires a year, according to LookupAPlate.com, a site that collects reports about bad drivers... Finding space for a spare is particularly challenging for a car powered by something other than gasoline, designers say. "Pushing the range of EVs requires batteries, electrical systems control units or hydrogen tanks to encroach into the traditional places that spare tires are found: under the trunk floor," said Geoff Wardle, executive director of transportation systems and design at the ArtCenter College of Design. The space crunch is worse for hybrids, which require room for both a battery system and an internal combustion engine, said Scott Grasman, dean of the College of Engineering at Kettering University in Flint, Mich.
The extra weight always made it a little harder to meet fuel efficiency requirements — but spare tires also increase manufacturing costs, the article notes. "And tires for an EV may be more expensive than those for a gas-powered vehicle of the same size. That's because EVs tend to be heavier than their gas-fueled counterparts, so they require sturdier tires. And with comparatively quiet engines, they need tires that don't generate as much road noise."

But Gil Tal, director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, also pointed out to the Times that today's tires are just much better and more durable than they used to be: And because federal regulations require new cars to have tire pressure indicators, he said, drivers are alerted as soon as their tires need air. "In most cases, flat tires ... are the outcome of long low-pressure driving," he said. "And if you drive a modern car, it will tell you [that] you have low pressure long before you get into the catastrophic failure" of a flat.
So what are car manufacturers doing now? According to the article...

• Some manufacturers swap in inflatable spares that take up just a third of the space.

• Some cars ship with puncture kits since, the article points out, many people don't know how to change a tire anyways, and will probably just call a tow truck. "For these drivers, carmakers may safely assume that a can of Fix-a-Flat will be more useful..." (Others like Tesla and GM offer roadside assistance programs.)

Some car manufacturers are also using self-sealing or run-flat tires — but Wardle tells the Times these are "good if it is just a puncture from a nail but useless if you hit a pothole and split the rim and sidewall."

"Russia's first lunar mission in decades has ended in failure with its Luna 25 spacecraft crashing into the moon's surface," reports CNN: The incident, a blow to Russia's space ambitions, happened after communication with the robotic spacecraft was interrupted, a blow to Russia's space ambitions. Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, said it lost touch with Luna 25 on Saturday around 2:57 p.m. Moscow time... According to a "preliminary analysis," Luna-25 "switched to an off-design orbit" before the collision, Roscosmos said. It was not immediately clear what caused the crash... The news comes a day after the spacecraft reported an "emergency situation" as it was trying to enter a pre-landing orbit, according to Roscosmos...

The spacecraft was meant to complete Russia's first lunar landing mission in 47 years. The country's last lunar lander, Luna 24, landed on the surface of the moon on August 18, 1976... Luna 25 was seen as a proving ground for future robotic lunar exploration missions by Roscosmos. Several future Luna spacecraft were slated to make use of the same design. If it had been successful, Luna 25 would have marked a huge stride for the country's civil space program — which some experts say has faced issues for decades — and demonstrate that it could still perform in high-profile, high-stakes missions. "They were having a lot of problems with quality control, corruption, with funding," said Victoria Samson, the Washington office director for Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes the peaceful exploration of outer space, during an interview Friday.

News that Russia experienced issues with its spacecraft elicited sympathy that reverberated throughout the space community. Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's former head of science, said in a social media post that no one in the industry "wishes bad onto other explorers... We are reminded that landing on any celestial object is anything but easy & straightforward," he said,
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam and TheNameOfNick for sharing the news.

The United States Space Force has activated its first and only unit dedicated to targeting other nations' satellites and the ground stations that support them. Space.com reports: The 75th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Squadron (ISRS) was activated on Aug. 11 at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado. This unit is part of Space Delta 7, an element of the U.S. Space Force tasked with providing intelligence on adversary space capabilities. It'll do things like analyze the capabilities of potential targets, locate and track these targets as well as participate in "target engagement," which presumably refers to destroying or disrupting adversary satellites, the ground stations that support them and transmissions sent between the two.

Master Sgt. Desiree Cabrera, 75th ISRS operations superintendent, said the new unit will revolutionize the targeting capabilities of not just the Space Force, but also the entire U.S. military: "Not only are we standing up the sole targeting squadron in the U.S. Space Force, we are changing the way targeting is done across the joint community when it comes to space and electromagnetic warfare." The 75th ISRS will also analyze adversary space capabilities including "counterspace force threats," according to the Space Force's statement. Counterspace forces refer to adversary systems aimed at preventing the U.S. from using its own satellites during a conflict.

China launched what is thought to be the world's first geosynchronous orbit synthetic aperture radar satellite on Saturday. SpaceNews reports: A Long March 3B rocket lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China at 1:36 p.m. Eastern (1736 UTC) Aug. 12. The Land Exploration-4 01 (Ludi Tance-4 (01)) satellite successfully entered geosynchronous transfer orbit, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., (CASC) announced within an hour of liftoff. Few details of the satellite were provided by CASC. However the group's "blue book" outlining plans for 2023 released in January noted the launch of a "high-orbit 20-meter [resolution] SAR satellite."

The L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite will provide all-day, all-weather observation of China and surrounding areas, boosting the country's disaster prevention, reduction, and relief capabilities. The land observation satellite series and "high-orbit SAR technology" are listed in the country's Medium and Long Term Development Plan for Civilian Space Infrastructure (2015-2025). The plan includes establishing high and medium resolution optical and synthetic aperture radar constellations for a range of land, marine and atmospheric monitoring. The series is separate from the China High-resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS), which consists of Gaofen ("high resolution") satellites. China's Gaofen-4 satellite is a GEO optical satellite. SAR at GEO, while providing much lower resolution than satellites in low Earth orbit, can provide constant coverage and imagery despite cloud cover.

It is not yet known what orbital scheme the Land Exploration-4 (01) satellite will enter. An inclined GEO orbit would produce a "figure eight" ground track over the area of intended coverage. Chinese academics from the Beijing Institute of Technology have produced a study of various schemes, while others have published research into modified signal models for GEO SAR. The (01) designation suggests China could launch other SAR satellites into geosynchronous orbits. The satellite was developed by the China Academy of Spacecraft Technology (CAST.)

Dave Limp, a longtime executive at Amazon who oversees the unit that makes Echo smart speakers and the Alexa voice assistant, plans to retire "before the end of the year." The Seattle Times reports: In a note to employees, also posted on Amazon's corporate blog, Limp wrote that he'd been working in consumer electronics off and on for more than 30 years. "I love it, but I also want to look into the future through a different lens," he said. "I am not sure what that future is right now, with the notable exception that it won't be in the consumer electronics space." Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said the company would announce Limp's successor "in the coming weeks."

Limp's division was among those affected by an unprecedentedly large round of layoffs that affected 27,000 people. "I remain excited and quite optimistic about the products and services we're building in Devices and Services -- we're at the relative beginning of what's possible and what I believe these businesses will add for customers and the company," Jassy said.

While Apple's next line of smartwatches is expected to be a minor upgrade, the company is working on a revamped "Watch X" update for the device's 10th anniversary. Bloombeg's Mark Gurman reports: Apple is planning a splashy upgrade for its smartwatch, but you won't see it this year. The 2023 models, due next month, will be a minor refresh -- the kind of incremental update that has characterized the product in recent years. Inside Apple, executives have pondered the idea of switching away from this slow-but-steady annual upgrade cycle. The deliberations haven't gotten far (Apple has dutifully released a new watch every year since the category debuted in 2015), but recent updates to the device underscore why this is even a discussion. [...] Fact is, Apple isn't giving consumers many reasons to buy a new watch with each generation. The company did launch an impressive new Apple Watch Ultra last year that spurred upgrades at the high end, but 2023 will (once again) be another low-key year. [...]

Because of the Apple Watch's slow evolution over the years, the design has remained largely the same since the Series 4 launched in 2018 -- aside from the Ultra model. But that's poised to change. Apple is planning a "Watch X" model to mark the device's 10-year anniversary, and it promises to be the biggest overhaul yet. (The category was unveiled in 2014 and released the following year, so Apple is planning to launch Watch X either in 2024 or 2025.) With the X model, Apple designers are working on a thinner watch case and have explored changing the way bands are attached to the device.

Starting with the original Apple Watch, bands have slid into the sides of the chassis and attached with a locking mechanism. Keeping that design the same let the bands stay compatible with old and new models, but it has downsides. People involved in the development of new Apple Watches say the system takes up a considerable amount of space that could be better filled with a bigger battery or other components. To that end, the company has explored a new magnetic band attachment system, though it's unclear if it will be ready or used in the Watch X revamp. Even bigger changes are coming as well: a microLED display that tops the color and clarity of the current OLED screens, as well as a technology for monitoring blood pressure.

A bomb threat against Caesars Forum, the main venue for this week's DEF CON hacking convention, led to the halls being cleared on Saturday evening and the building searched by fire crews and police officers. The Register reports: The timing was very bad, coming in the evening of the main party night for the event. The conference Goons, the red-shirted volunteers who serve as guides and organizers, were praised by attendees for managing the evacuation with aplomb, but when it became clear that the search for the suspect device was going to be hard to find, the DEC CON team cancelled the evening's festivities at Caesars, to the disappointment of thousands.

"Last night we were asked to evacuate the building due to a report of a suspicious package. Local police and fire departments conducted a thorough investigation and ultimately determined that the package was safe," the organizers said. "They also conducted additional sweeps of the building as a precaution before allowing our team to return and prepare for today's con. We are working quickly to keep the original schedule on track, but please check here for additional updates before arriving at DEF CON." The event kicked off on August 10 and wrapped up by August 13.

Presumably the hoax caller thought of themselves as a merry prankster, rather than the selfish idiot who ruined everyone's night - particularly the timing for those in the Track Four hall who were enjoying 2001: A Space Odyssey and who were forced to miss the crucial last 10 minutes of the movie. While tricks and pranks are something of a tradition, they only get respect if they are clever and intricate, not some fool showing they could use a telephone. It's not like security at the show wasn't heavy enough. The event was patrolled regularly by security guards in body armor with handguns, tasers, the occasional police dog, and a host of other equipment that was a bit of an overkill for a bunch of peaceable hackers. Dubbed by some as "Gravy SEALs," by the end of the show they were visibly warming up, and this hack saw several of them accepting stickers from attendees.

"Earlier this year, after 15 years of searching, scientists finally heard the background hum of low-frequency gravitational waves that fill our universe," writes Space.com.

"Now, the hard work of searching for the source of these ripples in spacetime can begin." Currently, the primary suspects in this case are pairings of supermassive black holes with masses millions, or even billions, of times that of the sun. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't room for a few unusual suspects, which could potentially point us toward new physics....

[G]ravitational waves detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) express wavelengths that are thousands of miles (or km) in length and hold frequencies of milliseconds to seconds. The new gravitational waves detected by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), by contrast, have wavelengths on a scale of trillions of miles (or km). This is similar to the distance between the sun and its neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, a staggering 20 light-years in length. Plus, NANOGrav gravitational wavelengths have frequencies on scales of years instead of mere seconds. Practically, what this means is scientists need to build over 15 years of NANOGrav data to confirm a low-frequency gravitational wave detection.

But, when it happens, it's worth the wait. That's because these results have the capacity to point us toward new information about our universe... "The detection of low-frequency gravitational waves means they're from very different sources to the LIGO and Virgo sources, which are stellar mass black holes and neutron star mergers," Scott Ransom, a National Radio Astronomy Observatory astronomer and former chair of NANOGrav, told Space.com... Ransom is part of a collaboration of researchers that believe low-frequency gravitational waves, including those detected by NANOGrav, may originate from a pretty incredible source. They could come from, the team argues, hundreds of thousands of supermassive black hole pairings that, over the 13.8-billion-year course of cosmic history, came close enough together that they've merged...

"For many decades, theorists have hypothesized that supermassive black hole binaries should produce a signal with characteristics just like what NANOGrav and other pulsar timing arrays are seeing," Luke Zoltan Kelly, a Northwestern University theoretical astrophysicist and NANOGrav researcher, told Space.com. "For most of the community, supermassive black hole binaries are a natural best guess for what's producing the gravitational wave background...." Zoltan Kelley pointed out to Space.com that besides binaries, there are a number of new models in cosmology and in particle physics that, under the right circumstances, could also produce a similar gravitational wave background to that detected by NANOGrav. For example, axion or 'fuzzy' dark matter, cosmic strings, inflationary phase transitions, and many others," the Northwestern astrophysicist said.

"What's really exciting about these possibilities is that each of these models is an attempt to explain some of the biggest current mysteries of our universe."