Lifeboat Foundation

The results of the Chi-Nu physics experiment at Los Alamos National Laboratory have contributed essential, never-before-observed data for enhancing nuclear security applications, understanding criticality safety and designing fast-neutron energy reactors. The Chi-Nu project, a years-long experiment measuring the energy spectrum of neutrons emitted from neutron-induced fission, recently concluded the most detailed and extensive uncertainty analysis of the three major actinide elements—uranium-238, uranium-235 and plutonium-239.

“Nuclear fission and related nuclear chain reactions were only discovered a little more than 80 years ago, and experimenters are still working to provide the full picture of fission processes for the major actinides,” said Keegan Kelly, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Throughout the course of this project, we have observed clear signatures of fission processes that in many cases were never observed in any previous experiment.”

The Los Alamos team’s final Chi-Nu study, on the isotope uranium-238, was recently published in Physical Review C. The experiment measured uranium-238’s prompt fission neutron spectrum: the energy of the neutron inducing the fission—the neutron that crashes into a nucleus and splits it—and the potentially wide-ranging energy distribution (the spectrum) of the neutrons released as a result. Chi-Nu focuses on “fast-neutron-induced” fission, with incident neutron energies in millions of electron volts, where there have typically been very few measurements.

NASA Celebrates Arrival of OSIRIS-REx and Bennu Asteroid Samples on Earth

In a historic moment that marks the culmination of a seven-year interstellar odyssey, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has successfully delivered its first precious cargo to Earth. The long-awaited rendezvous with the asteroid Bennu has yielded a treasure trove of samples that are now undergoing meticulous examination by scientists and researchers.

The momentous touchdown occurred on Sunday, September 24, at the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range. Subsequently, the valuable package was carefully hoisted onto a waiting helicopter before embarking on the final leg of its journey to a high-security clean room. Access to this pristine environment is strictly limited to a select group of six individuals.

The operations are based on an outdoor docking system that incorporates the firm’s AtlasPRO tricopter drones meant for surveillance.

Providing fool-proof security at airports proves to be challenging due to various logistical limitations, primarily due to its size, even though the airport security system is typically organized clearly and logically.

Continue reading “AtlasNEST plans to deploy drones to enhance airport security” »

After years of anticipation and hard work by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) team, a capsule of rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu finally is on Earth. It landed at 8:52 a.m. MDT (10:52 a.m. EDT) on Sunday, in a targeted area of the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City.

Within an hour and a half, the capsule was transported by helicopter to a temporary clean room set up in a hangar on the training range, where it now is connected to a continuous flow of nitrogen.

Getting the sample under a “nitrogen purge,” as scientists call it, was one of the OSIRIS-REx team’s most critical tasks today. Nitrogen is a gas that doesn’t interact with most other chemicals, and a continuous flow of it into the sample container inside the capsule will keep out earthly contaminants to leave the sample pure for scientific analyses.

In the morning hours of Sept. 24, a small capsule containing surface samples from asteroid 101,955 Bennu careened into Earth’s atmosphere after a seven-year journey through space. The landing of this sample capsule is the culmination of NASA’s historic Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) asteroid sample return mission, which is now the first American mission to return samples from an asteroid.

The sample return capsule (SRC) landed within a 14 by 58-kilometer ellipse at a Department of Defense property at the Utah Test and Training Range and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Touchdown of the SRC occurred at 8:52 AM MDT (14:52 UTC) — three minutes earlier than planned. Low winds and dry weather was present at Dugway during the landing — optimal conditions for the return and recovery of the SRC.

Continue reading “Historic OSIRIS-REx asteroid samples successfully return to Earth” »

The New York Police Department (NYPD) is implementing a new security measure at the Times Square subway station. It’s deploying a security robot to patrol the premises, which authorities say is meant to “keep you safe.” We’re not talking about a RoboCop-like machine or any human-like biped robot — the K5, which was made by California-based company Knightscope, looks like a massive version of R2-D2. Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of privacy rights group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, has a less flattering description for it, though, and told The New York Times that it’s like a “trash can on wheels.”

K5 weighs 420 pounds and is equipped with four cameras that can record video but not audio. As you can guess from the image above, the machine also doesn’t come with arms — it didn’t quite ignore Mayor Eric Adams’ attempt at making a heart. The robot will patrol the station from midnight until 6 AM throughout its trial run that’s running over the next two months. But K5 won’t be doing full patrols for a while, since it’s spending its first two weeks mapping out the station and roaming only the main areas and not the platforms.

It’s not quite clear if NYPD’s machine will be livestreaming its camera footage, and if law enforcement will be keeping an eye on what it captures. Adams said during the event introducing the robot that it will “record video that can be reviewed in case of an emergency or a crime.” It apparently won’t be using facial recognition, though Cahn is concerned that the technology could eventually be incorporated into the machine. Obviously, K5 doesn’t have the capability to respond to actual emergencies in the station and can’t physically or verbally apprehend suspects. The only real-time help it can provide people is to connect them to a live person to report an incident or to ask questions, provided they’re able to press a button on the robot.

We are entering a new era of AI, one that is fundamentally changing how we relate to and benefit from technology. With the convergence of chat interfaces and large language models you can now ask for what you want in natural language and the technology is smart enough to answer, create it or take action. At Microsoft, we think about this as having a copilot to help navigate any task. We have been building AI-powered copilots into our most used and loved products – making coding more efficient with GitHub, transforming productivity at work with Microsoft 365, redefining search with Bing and Edge and delivering contextual value that works across your apps and PC with Windows.

Today we take the next step to unify these capabilities into a single experience we call Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion. Copilot will uniquely incorporate the context and intelligence of the web, your work data and what you are doing in the moment on your PC to provide better assistance – with your privacy and security at the forefront. It will be a simple and seamless experience, available in Windows 11, Microsoft 365, and in our web browser with Edge and Bing. It will work as an app or reveal itself when you need it with a right click. We will continue to add capabilities and connections to Copilot across to our most-used applications over time in service of our vision to have one experience that works across your whole life.

Continue reading “Announcing Microsoft Copilot, your everyday AI companion” »

Cisco has a reputation of building the company through acquisitions, but it has tended to stay away from the really huge ones. That changed this morning when the company announced it was acquiring Splunk for $28 billion.

With Splunk, it gets an observability platform that could fit nicely into its security business to help customers better understand security threats, while also helping parse oodles of log data to resolve other problems like helping understand system failures or troubleshoot myriad issues across a broad array of enterprise systems.

Under the terms of the deal, Cisco is paying a hefty premium of $157 per share. When you consider that the 52-week low was $65 a share and it has hovered in the high 80s and low 90s much of this year, that’s a big bump for Splunk stockholders and suggests there might have been some competition for the logging giant. The company’s most recent market cap sits at just over $20 billion.

Since its launch in 2017, Harness, the software delivery platform founded by AppDynamics founder and CEO Jyoti Bansal, expanded from being continuous code deployment to covering continuous integration, feature flags, cloud cost management, security testing orchestration, chaos engineering and more. But even though it focused heavily on GitOps, it never offered its own Git repositories. That’s changing today with the launch of the Gitness open-source Git repository and the Harness Code Repository, the hosted and managed version of Gitness.

“There hasn’t been a new Git repo launch in almost a decade,” Bansal told me. “Now you have GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket from Atlassian, but that’s really it. […] If you look at any of the git repos, whether it’s GitLab or GitHub or Bitbucket, they don’t have the true one source ethos around them anymore. We strongly believe that Git started as open source, so let’s bring the true open-source ethos back to Git repos.”