Tag: newly
Want to see a newly discovered comet? Look up in January.
Look up, stargazers: A comet discovered last March in Jupiter’s orbit is soaring through our space neighborhood.
The new comet, officially dubbed C/2022 E3 (ZTF) by the Minor Planet Center, is a bright ball of ice, dust, and rock. These glacial objects, known for their millions-of-miles-long streaks, are among the oldest in the solar system, leftover from the early days when planets around Earth were just forming.
The comet will be closest to the sun on Jan. 12, then make its closest sweep by Earth on Feb. 2, according to NASA astronomers.
Remember that space is a big place; the comet doesn’t pose any threat to this planet. Some have estimated the cosmic boulder will still be 26.4 million miles away at its nearest.
If you live north of the equator, astronomers recommend trying to spot the comet in the pre-dawn morning sky. It’ll become visible in the Southern Hemisphere in early February.
“Comets are notoriously unpredictable,” said Preston Dyches from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in an explanatory video. “But if this one continues its current trend in brightness, it’ll be easy to spot with binoculars, and it’s just possible it could become visible to the unaided eye under dark skies.”
“It’s just possible it could become visible to the unaided eye under dark skies.”
Credit: History / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The comet is much brighter than when it was first detected and is now zipping across the Corona Borealis, a northern constellation, in the early morning darkness. NASA featured a photo of the comet taken by an independent astrophotographer on Dec. 19, 2022, which showcases its greenish orb, stubby dust tail, and long, faint gas tail.
“This comet isn’t expected to be quite the spectacle that Comet NEOWISE was back in 2020,” said Dyches, referencing the brightest comet since Hale-Bopp to come this way. “But it’s still an awesome opportunity to make a personal connection with an icy visitor from the distant outer solar system.”
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Winter constellations to watch
January’s night skies are brimming with twinklers. Looking south or southeast in the first few hours after dark, stargazers in the Northern Hemisphere might catch some of winter’s greatest hits: Orion the hunter; the big dog constellation Canis Major; Taurus the bull; and, just east of Orion, Castor and Pollux, the heads of the Gemini twins.
Planet groupings and conjunctions
Throughout the month, planets appear to be squeezing in close for family photos, with four visible after each sunset, even without binoculars or a telescope.
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Jan. 2: The moon and Mars will be high in the southeast, grouped with the Pleiades and Aldebaran stars.
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Jan. 18-24: Venus will cross paths with Saturn about 45 minutes after sunset in the low southwest. Then, on Jan. 23, the crescent moon will make a photo bomb.
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Jan. 25: About 30 to 45 minutes after sunset, high above Venus and Saturn, the moon should be butting up to Jupiter.
Newly public ZyVersa stock falls 40% after plunging 67% in debut session
China Launches Astronauts To Newly Completed Space Station
With a sustained presence in low-Earth orbit aboard Tiangong, Chinese space officials are preparing to put astronauts on the moon, which NASA also intends to revisit before the end of the decade as part of its Artemis program. “It will not take a long time; we can achieve the goal of manned moon landing,” Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China’s crewed space program, said in an interview at the launch center. China has been developing a lunar lander, he added, without giving a date when it might be used. The launch of Shenzhou 15 comes less than two weeks after NASA finally launched its Artemis I mission following many delays. That flight has put its uncrewed Orion capsule into orbit around the moon.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Rising costs set to wipe out 90% of newly announced NHS funding
Persona 5 is still a masterpiece – and it’s a must-play for those newly able to get it on PC, Xbox, and Switch
If you’re a fan of Japanese RPGs but somehow aren’t a PlayStation user – which does appear to be a contradiction of terms, admittedly – this week marks a momentous occasion. Persona 5 Royal, the enhanced re-release of a 2016 game of the year contender, is finally on non-PlayStation platforms.
At this stage, Persona 5 is already six years old. It is, by any definition, old news. Even the Royal update is three. Elements of the game also haven’t aged well – especially a few story elements and tonal choices that felt pretty archaic and out-of-date back when the game originally released, leave alone six years hence. But the thing is, it’s still brilliant. Persona 5 is still one of the best and most important Japanese RPGs of the last decade.
Part of the reason behind this is that Persona takes an interesting path compared to the biggest-name JRPGs. Its most obvious peer is Final Fantasy, the series that acts as patriarch to the entire genre – which I suppose makes Dragon Quest the matriarch. Whereas Final Fantasy has spent the last decade or so analyzing and trying to emulate the successes of Western RPGs like The Witcher, Skyrim, and even Mass Effect, Persona 5 is unabashed in what it is – a full fat, highly traditional, anime AF role-playing game.
Get the newly upgraded Crucial X6 2TB portable SSD for £129
The Crucial X6 is one of the best portable SSDs on the market, and a ginormous 2TB model is currently discounted to £129 at Amazon, from its normal price of £150. This makes it the cheapest 2TB portable SSD by a significant margin, with alternatives like the Samsung T7 and SanDisk Extreme 2TB costing £191 or more – and an excellent value for a drive of this calibre.
Loch Ness Monster Spotted Twice on Newly Installed Webcams? – Coast2Coast AM
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Twitter Pranksters Derail GPT-3 Bot With Newly Discovered ‘Prompt Injection’ Hack
This recent hack came just four days after data researcher Riley Goodside discovered the ability to prompt GPT-3 with “malicious inputs” that order the model to ignore its previous directions and do something else instead. AI researcher Simon Willison posted an overview of the exploit on his blog the following day, coining the term “prompt injection” to describe it. “The exploit is present any time anyone writes a piece of software that works by providing a hard-coded set of prompt instructions and then appends input provided by a user,” Willison told Ars. “That’s because the user can type ‘Ignore previous instructions and (do this instead).'”
The concept of an injection attack is not new. Security researchers have known about SQL injection, for example, which can execute a harmful SQL statement when asking for user input if it’s not guarded against. But Willison expressed concern about mitigating prompt injection attacks, writing, “I know how to beat XSS, and SQL injection, and so many other exploits. I have no idea how to reliably beat prompt injection!” The difficulty in defending against prompt injection comes from the fact that mitigations for other types of injection attacks come from fixing syntax errors, noted a researcher named Glyph on Twitter. “Correct the syntax and you’ve corrected the error. Prompt injection isn’t an error! There’s no formal syntax for AI like this, that’s the whole point.” GPT-3 is a large language model created by OpenAI, released in 2020, that can compose text in many styles at a level similar to a human. It is available as a commercial product through an API that can be integrated into third-party products like bots, subject to OpenAI’s approval. That means there could be lots of GPT-3-infused products out there that might be vulnerable to prompt injection.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Newly identified browser bug allows websites to overwrite clipboard content
Google developer Jeff Johnson explained how the vulnerability can be triggered in several ways, all of which grant the page permissions to overwrite clipboard contents. Once granted, users can be affected by actively triggering a cut or copy action, clicking on links in the page, or even taking actions as…