ArduinoMania

You’d think grabbing a scoop of dirt off an orbiting space rock and then delivering it back to Earth would be the most complicated part of an asteroid sample collection mission, but the real challenge, it turns out, is actually opening that sample container once it’s back home. It’s taken a little over three months, but NASA says it has finally removed two stuck fasteners that were preventing it from accessing the bulk of material collected from asteroid Bennu by its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. OSIRIS-REx dropped the sample off on September 24 before heading off to study another asteroid, Apophis.

While NASA was initially able to collect a few ounces of asteroid material that was found on the outside of the Touch-and-Go-Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM), its inner contents remained locked away due to issues with two of the 35 fasteners that keep the container closed. The TAGSAM is housed in a special glovebox to prevent the sample from being contaminated, and only certain tools are approved for use with it. None of the existing tools were working to get the stubborn fasteners off the TAGSAM head, so the team had to develop new ones.

“In addition to the design challenge of being limited to curation-approved materials to protect the scientific value of the asteroid sample, these new tools also needed to function within the tightly-confined space of the glovebox, limiting their height, weight, and potential arc movement,” said Dr. Nicole Lunning, an OSIRIS-REx curator. Now that the TAGSAM head has been freed, the team can move forward with the container’s disassembly — meaning we’ll soon be able to see what’s inside. NASA’s preliminary assessment of dust and rocks from outside the TAGSAM found evidence of carbon and water.

Apple AirTags can really come in handy when one of your belongings has gone missing, and with a deal on Amazon right now, you can pick up a four-pack of the trackers to keep more of your things protected. Normally $99, a 10 percent discount has dropped the price of a four-pack to $89 — and with a $10 coupon that’s being offered alongside the deal, that’s slashed even further to just $79. Just don’t forget to check the “Apply $10 coupon” box before adding it to your cart.

AirTags have become a staple for Apple device owners over the past few years. The Bluetooth trackers are a little bigger than a quarter and slim enough to slip into a wallet, making them a convenient way to keep tabs on your possessions. With the right accessories for your AirTags, they can also be attached to a keychain or stuck directly onto the tracked items to be sure they stay put. AirTags rely on Apple’s Find My network, which can provide precise location information as long as there are other Apple devices nearby.

When the AirTags aren’t in the range of any Apple devices to generate a new position, the app will show the item’s last known location. They don’t need to be charged, either, and should last about a year before the battery needs to be replaced. Users can add up to 32 items in the Find My app to track. With the Find my app, you can also ping the AirTag so it will play a sound and lead you right to the lost item if it's within your vicinity.

AirTags come with an IP67 rating for water and dust resistance, meaning they are pretty durable against the elements under normal conditions. They’re built to survive splashes of water and submersion up to 1 meter for 30 minutes. AirTags are the best Bluetooth trackers for iPhone owners thanks to the ease of use and peace of mind they bring.

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Facebook was flooded with fake advertisements featuring a deepfaked Rishi Sunak ahead of the UK's general election that's expected to take place this year, according to research conducted by communications company Fenimore Harper. The firm found 143 different ads impersonating the UK's Prime Minister on the social network last month, and it believes the ad may have reached more than 400,000 people. It also said that funding for the ads originated from 23 countries, including Turkey, Malaysia, the Philippines and the United States, and that the collective amount of money spent to promote them from December 8, 2023 to January 8, 2024 was $16,500. 

As The Guardian notes, one of the fake ads showed a BBC newscast wherein Sunak said that the UK government has decided to invest in a stock market app launched by Elon Musk. That clip then reportedly linked to a fake BBC news page promoting an investment scam. The video, embedded in Fenimore Harper's website, seems pretty realistic if the viewer doesn't look too closely at people's mouths when they speak. Someone who has no idea what deepfakes are could easily be fooled into thinking that the video is legit.

The company says this is the "first widespread paid promotion of a deepfaked video of a UK political figure." That said, Meta has long been contending with election misinformation on its websites and apps. A spokesperson told The Guardian that the "vast majority" of the adverts were disabled before Fenimore Harper's report was published and that "less than 0.5 percent of UK users saw any individual ad that did go live."

Meta announced late last year that it was going to require advertisers to disclose whether the ads they submit have been digitally altered in the event that they're political or social in nature. It's going to start enforcing the rule this year, likely in hopes that it can help mitigate the expected spread of fake news connected to the upcoming presidential elections in the US. 

Just a few days ago, OpenAI's usage policies page explicitly states that the company prohibits the use of its technology for "military and warfare" purposes. That line has since been deleted. As first noticed by The Intercept, the company updated the page on January 10 "to be clearer and provide more service-specific guidance," as the changelog states. It still prohibits the use of its large language models (LLMs) for anything that can cause harm, and it warns people against using its services to "develop or use weapons." However, the company has removed language pertaining to "military and warfare."

While we've yet to see its real-life implications, this change in wording comes just as military agencies around the world are showing an interest in using AI. "Given the use of AI systems in the targeting of civilians in Gaza, it’s a notable moment to make the decision to remove the words ‘military and warfare’ from OpenAI’s permissible use policy,” Sarah Myers West, a managing director of the AI Now Institute, told the publication. 

The explicit mention of "military and warfare" in the list of prohibited uses indicated that OpenAI couldn't work with government agencies like the Department of Defense, which typically offers lucrative deals to contractors. At the moment, the company doesn't have a product that could directly kill or cause physical harm to anybody. But as The Intercept said, its technology could be used for tasks like writing code and processing procurement orders for things that could be used to kill people. 

When asked about the change in its policy wording, OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix told the publication that the company "aimed to create a set of universal principles that are both easy to remember and apply, especially as our tools are now globally used by everyday users who can now also build GPTs." Felix explained that "a principle like ‘Don’t harm others’ is broad yet easily grasped and relevant in numerous contexts," adding that OpenAI "specifically cited weapons and injury to others as clear examples." However, the spokesperson reportedly declined to clarify whether prohibiting the use of its technology to "harm" others included all types of military use outside of weapons development. 

At CES 2024, ASUS seems to have taken people by surprise with the announcement of its AirVision M1 glasses, with some viewing it as an alternative to Apple’s Vision Pro headset. But I discovered that ASUS’ glasses are much more of a novel alternative to portable monitors than something meant for spatial computing. 

The big difference between the AirVision M1 glasses and something like the Vision Pro or even Xreal’s Air 2 Ultras is that it doesn’t really support anything in the way of interactive AR. Sure, the glasses are able to project your desktop or multiple windows into space, but it needs to be tethered to a nearby device and doesn’t recognize hand gestures or other virtual objects. 

Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget

Instead, I found that its primary purpose is to give you extra screen space, but without the need to carry around big and bulky portable monitors. Featuring built-in microLED displays with a full HD resolution, the AirVisions can display up to six or seven virtual windows or desktops. You can also choose betwe

en a handful of aspect ratios (16:9, 21:9, 32:9 and more), with the glasses three degrees of freedom allowing you to either pin those screens in virtual space or track your head as you move around. 

Instead, I found that its primary purpose is to give you extra screen space, but without the need to carry around big and bulky portable monitors. Featuring built-in microLED displays with a full HD resolution, the AirVisions can display up to six or seven virtual windows or desktops. You can also choose between a handful of aspect ratios (16:9, 21:9, 32:9 and more), with the glasses three degrees of freedom allowing you to either pin those screens in virtual space or track your head as you move around. 

Instead, I found that its primary purpose is to give you extra screen space, but without the need to carry around big and bulky portable monitors. Featuring built-in microLED displays with a full HD resolution, the AirVisions can display up to six or seven virtual windows or desktops. You can also choose between a handful of aspect ratios (16:9, 21:9, 32:9 and more), with the glasses three degrees of freedom allowing you to either pin those screens in virtual space or track your head as you move around. Instead, I found that its primary purpose is to give you extra screen space, but without the need to carry around big and bulky portable monitors. Featuring built-in microLED displays with a full HD resolution, the AirVisions can display up to six or seven virtual windows or desktops. You can also choose between a handful of aspect ratios (16:9, 21:9, 32:9 and more), with the glasses three degrees of freedom allowing you to either pin those screens in virtual space or track your head as you move around. 

During my first demo, I used the AirVision M1s while tethered to a laptop, in which it behaved almost exactly like having a bit floating desktop that appeared to be hovering six feet in front of me. At first, the virtual displays were a little blurry, but after a short adjustment period and some time dialing in my IPD (interpupillary distance), I was pleasantly surprised by how sharp everything looked. When compared to something like Sightful Spacetop, which is billed as the world’s first AR laptop, not only did it have a much larger vertical field of view (up to 57 degrees), it also didn’t require any additional special equipment, as the glasses are essentially plug and play. While I didn’t need them, it’s important to note that the glasses come with a pair of nose pads to help ensure you can get a good fit, plus a prescription insert for people with glasses.

Once set up, it was pretty easy to create additional virtual workspaces. All I had to do was pull up a small command menu, press a plus sign where I wanted a new window to appear and that’s it. You can also freely adjust the overall size of the virtual display by zooming in or out. And one of the best things about the AirVisions is that using the laptop’s touchpad or typing wasn’t difficult at all. Because you can see through the virtual displays, I simply looked down and focused my eyes where they needed to go. That said, if you become distracted by something in the background, ASUS’ glasses also come with magnetic blinders that clip onto the front and provide a clean black backdrop.

However my favorite use case was when I tried a different pair of the AirVisions that were connected to an ROG Ally, where the glasses provided me with a massive virtual screen for gaming. In this way, it’s a lot like wearing a headset such as the Meta Quest 3, but for non-VR games. This is the kind of device I would love to have on a plane, where space is at a premium, especially for something like a portable monitor. That said, I’m not sure I could handle the embarrassment of being a modern day glasshole, at least not until devices like these become a bit more popular.

But perhaps the biggest difference between the AirVision M1s and Apple’s Vision Pro is price. While ASUS has yet to provide an official figure, a company spokesperson told me that ASUS is targeting around $700, versus $3,000 for Apple’s headset. And when you compare that to the price of a portable monitor, which often goes for between $250 and $400, and offers a lot less screen space, suddenly that price doesn’t seem too ridiculous.

So if you’re on the lookout for an alternative to the travel monitor, keep an eye for ASUS’ AirVision M1 glasses when they become available sometime in Q3 2024. 

We're reporting live from CES 2024 in Las Vegas from January 6-12. Keep up with all the latest news from the show here.

Artifact, the buzzy news app from Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, is shutting down less than a year after its launch. In a note on Medium, Systrom said the app’s “core news reading” features would be online through the end of February, but that it would remove commenting and posting abilities immediately.

Besides its famous founding team, the app was known for AI-centric features as well as Reddit-like commenting and posting abilities. The app had won praise from journalists who appreciated reporter-friendly features like dedicated author pages and had been featured prominently in Apple and Google’s app stores.

But after a year of work, it seems Systrom and Krieger encountered many of the same struggles as founders of buzzy news apps before them. “We have built something that a core group of users love, but we have concluded that the market opportunity isn’t big enough to warrant continued investment in this way,” Systrom wrote.

While he didn’t say what he might do next, Systrom’s note hinted that he may at some point take on a new AI-focused project. “I am personally excited to continue building new things, though only time will tell what that might be,” he wrote. “We live in an exciting time where artificial intelligence is changing just about everything we touch, and the opportunities for new ideas seem limitless.”

In the meantime, Artifact fans have a few more weeks to keep checking headlines before the app goes offline for good.

Researchers at MIT’s CSAIL division, which focuses on computer engineering and AI development, built two machine learning algorithms that can detect pancreatic cancer at a higher threshold than current diagnostic standards. The two models together formed to create the “PRISM” neural network. It is designed to specifically detect pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the most prevalent form of pancreatic cancer.

The current standard PDAC screening criteria catches about 10 percent of cases in patients examined by professionals. In comparison, MIT’s PRISM was able to identify PDAC cases 35 percent of the time.

While using AI in the field of diagnostics is not an entirely new feat, MIT’s PRISM stands out because of how it was developed. The neural network was programmed based on access to diverse sets of real electronic health records from health institutions across the US. It was fed the data of over 5 million patient’s electronic health records, which researchers from the team said “surpassed the scale” of information fed to an AI model in this particular area of research. “The model uses routine clinical and lab data to make its predictions, and the diversity of the US population is a significant advancement over other PDAC models, which are usually confined to specific geographic regions like a few healthcare centers in the US,” Kai Jia, MIT CSAIL PhD senior author of the paper said.

MIT’s PRISM project started over six years ago. The motivation behind developing an algorithm that can detect PDAC early has a lot to do with the fact that most patients get diagnosed in the later stages of the cancer’s development — specifically about eighty percent are diagnosed far too late.

The AI works by analyzing patient demographics, previous diagnoses, current and previous medications in care plans and lab results. Collectively, the model works to predict the probability of cancer by analyzing electronic health record data in tandem with things like a patient’s age and certain risk factors evident in their lifestyle. Still, PRISM is still only able to help diagnose as many patients at the rate the AI can reach the masses. At the moment, the technology is bound to MIT labs and select patients in the US. The logistical challenge of scaling the AI will involve feeding the algorithm more diverse data sets and perhaps even global health profiles to increase accessibility.

Nonetheless, this isn't MIT’s first stab at developing an AI model that can predict cancer risk. It notably developed a way to train models how to predict the risk of breast cancer among women using mammogram records. In that line of research, MIT experts confirmed, the more diverse the data sets, the better the AI gets at diagnosing cancers across diverse races and populations. The continued development of AI models that can predict cancer probability will not only improve outcomes for patients if malignancy is identified earlier, it will also lessen the workload of overworked medical professionals. The market for AI in diagnostics is so ripe for change that it is piquing the interest of big tech commercial companies like IBM, which attempted to create an AI program that can detect breast cancer a year in advance.

Welcome back to our weekly gaming news roundup. 

January is a magical time in the video game industry. We've just closed out 12 months of marketing hype and shifting production timelines, and the year ahead is filled with the promises of new titles and fresh hardware. During this special month, we can look at the 2024 release calendar with excitement and optimism, before the delays start rolling in. So, let's get to it — these hearts aren't going to break themselves.

This week's stories

Arcane season 2 teaser

You watched Arcane, right? The Netflix series set in the League of Legends universe debuted in late 2021 and it was an instant sensation, starring fan-favorite characters like Jinx, Vi and Caitlyn. The next season is set to come out in November and Riot dropped a one-minute teaser for it last Friday. The trailer has Singed experimenting on himself in a dreary laboratory, while a creature that looks like Warwick hangs above, connected to tubes and IVs. It’s gonna get dark, kids.

If you haven’t watched season one of Arcane, do that now.

This kid beat Tetris

I guess we can all stop playing Tetris. 13-year-old Willis Gibson became the first person to reach the killscreen in the classic NES version of Tetris, 34 years after the game’s debut. Gibson caught the moment on camera and honestly, it gives me goosebumps every time I watch it. The competitive Tetris scene has been steadily growing over the past few years, and players are using a new input technique called rolling that allows them to move pieces faster than ever. If you’re into this kind of thing, I recommend watching Classic Tetris Monthly on Twitch or YouTube.

Promises, promises

Before we get back into all the award shows and livestreams and media events this year, let’s take a look at the video game promises heading into 2024.

There’s nothing official yet, but it looks like Nintendo is preparing to release the Switch 2 in 2024, seven years after the launch of the original Switch, and right in the middle of the PS5 and Xbox Series X console cycle. According to early reports, the Switch 2 will be an iterative hardware update with slightly more processing power and support for DLSS and raytracing. The big news is that Nintendo has finally joined us in the 21st century, and players should be able to transfer their Switch games to the new console without any roadblocks.

Outside of the new Switch, 2024 is all about games. We know how this goes, right — in video games, a release date is really just the first step before a delay, so whatever you’re into, prepare for heartbreak over the next 12 months.

There are two games I’m confident will actually hit the market on their release dates in 2024, and that’s only because they’ve been in development for years and delayed multiple times already. Ubisoft’s open-world pirate simulator Skull and Bones is due out on February 16 for PS5, Xbox and PC, and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth will hit PS5 on February 29. Rebirth looks legit, while Skull and Bones … doesn’t.

Overall, we have a healthy lineup of titles to get excited about in 2024. First, on the mainstream front: 

• January 18: Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown | Ubisoft Montpellier

• January 19: The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered | Naughty Dog

• January 26: Tekken 8 | Bandai Namco Studios, Arika

• February 2: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League | Rocksteady Studios

• February 2: Persona 3 Reload | P-Studio

• February 16: Skull and Bones | Ubisoft

• February 29: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth | Square Enix

• March 22: Dragon’s Dogma 2 | Capcom

• March 22: Princess Peach: Showtime! | Nintendo

• March 22: Rise of the Ronin | Team Ninja

• 2024: Silent Hill 2 remake | Bloober Team

• 2024: Star Wars Outlaws | Massive Entertainment

• 2024: Avowed | Obsidian Entertainment

• 2024: Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 | Ninja Theory

• 2024: Concord | Firewalk Studios

• 2024: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door | Nintendo

This isn't a comprehensive list for the year in AAA gaming, but it's a solid start. 

And then there are the games I’m personally looking forward to in 2024. Most of these still have vague release windows — it's as if the developers didn’t want to give a timeframe at all, so they just whispered 2024 to their marketing teams and hoped no one would notice. But I did. I always do. I’m always watching.

Here are the games on my underground radar this year (again, this isn't an exhaustive list because there are so many fantastic games nowadays, but these ones spring to mind):

• January 16: Home Safety Hotline | Night Signal Entertainment

• August 20: Black Myth: Wukong | Game Science

• 2024: Skate Story | Sam Eng

• 2024: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes | Simogo

• 2024: Baby Steps | Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy

• 2024: The Plucky Squire | All Possible Futures

• 2024: Mewgenics | Edmund McMillen, Tyler Glaiel

• 2024: 33 Immortals | Thunder Lotus

• 2024: Thank Goodness You’re Here! | Coal Supper

• 2024: Despelote | Julián Cordero, Sebastian Valbuena

• 2024: Time Flies | Playables, Raphaël Munoz, Michael Frei

• 2024: Cryptmaster | Paul Hart, Lee Williams, Akupara Games

• 2024: Hades 2 | Supergiant Games

• 2024: Hyper Light Breaker | Heart Machine

When any of these titles is inevitably delayed, we can all gather right here and have a good cry. Let us know in the comments what you’re looking forward to this year and why it’s Hollow Knight: Silksong.

Now Playing

I’ve been sticking with local co-op games during these chilly winter months, and now I’ve moved on to Baldur’s Gate 3. I know, I know, everyone is already telling you to play it, but this pitch is strictly for the splitscreen crowd — Baldur’s Gate 3 is a joy to play alongside a loved one, as long as your cleric actually remembers to heal your party every now and then. You know who you are.

NASA’s X-59 Quesst supersonic commercial jet, which is being developed by Lockheed Martin, will have its flight test livestreamed as a demonstration of how quiet it can be in the air. The $247.5 million Quesst, whose name is short for Quiet SuperSonic Tech, will be shown on the livestream dramatically emerging from Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California. NASA has been on a mission since 2018 to prove that its X-59 can fly over cities without producing noise pollution, or sonic booms. This test flight marks an important milestone in the six-year-old project.

The first flight will be streamed on January 12 at 4pm ET on YouTube, as well as the NASA app and the NASA+ streaming service.

The space agency said it will survey people about the noises they hear from the jet during the first flight. It did not specify how it would find these people, or many people it would poll. The data collected will be sent to regulators and used to help propose new rules that limit the use of supersonic jets. The US federal government has blocked all civilian supersonic jets from flying over land for over five decades.

When NASA first announced its quiet supersonic technology project in 2018, administrator Jim Bridenstine said, “This aircraft has the potential to transform aviation in the United States.” While the jet was supposed to first take flight in 2021, the debut today still marks a major milestone in the QueSST mission. By 2027, NASA expects to have more definitive results about how effective the new aircraft technology is at reducing flight noise.

If new laws are eventually passed that permit supersonic jet aircrafts to fly in close proximity to land, high-speed commercial flights could become a reality. Once NASA and Lockheed Martin finalize development of the aircraft, the agency said it will conduct safety evaluations for about nine months. After enough evidence is shared to prove that the Quesst aircraft can be flown safely, NASA plans to expand its flight tests to cities across the US and collect more information about the noise it produces through additional surveys.

The Environmental Protection Agency has scrapped a plan to phase out mammal testing for studying chemical toxicity, Science reports. In 2019, the regulatory agency vowed to completely phase out animal testing for toxicology studies by 2035 in favor of non-animal “test subjects” programmed into computer models.

The call to challenge the status quo was controversial from the start — it not only was going to impact thousands of studies and experiments, but many scientists argued that computer models were nowhere near ready to replace animals as test subjects. In a letter written by a group of public health officials, the experts urged the EPA’s head Michael Regan to reconsider the ban because computational models, in their opinion, were “not yet developed to the point” where they could be relied on for risk assessments.

In order for the new ban to have taken effect, the EPA said there needed to be “scientific confidence” that non-animal models could soundly replace critters like mice and rabbits in labs. Despite the 2035 deadline being put on ice, however, an EPA spokesperson told Science that it would still explore alternatives to animal testing.

The ambitious plan is not entirely a lost cause, though. While the EPA hasn’t made any official statements about how it plans to work toward its original goal, now without a deadline, some studies have shown promise that computational models might effectively reflect the toxicology of certain chemicals during testing. In some instances, these studies suggest, they can even outperform lab rats.

3D developments like technical organoids are also popping up on the research front by way of stem cells that allow duped livers to be tested and evaluated during research as a human liver would. Labs are currently working on ways to more effectively develop realistic organs using 3D printers. But it might be a while before 3D printing can consistently be used to assist biologists and pharmacologists for research and drug testing.