Latest move to tighten regulation comes amid soaring use of algorithms for content recommendation, e-commerce and gig work distribution

Tech operators in China have been given a deadline to rectify issues with recommendation algorithms, as authorities move to revise cybersecurity regulations in place since 2021.

A three-month campaign to address “typical issues with algorithms” on online platforms was launched on Sunday, according to a notice from the Communist Party’s commission for cyberspace affairs, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and other relevant departments. The campaign, which will last until February 14, marks the latest effort to curb the influence of Big Tech companies in shaping online views and opinions through algorithms – the technology behind the recommendation functions of most apps and websites.

System providers should avoid recommendation algorithms that create “echo chambers” and induce addiction, allow manipulation of trending items, or exploit gig workers’ rights, the notice said.

They should also crack down on unfair pricing and discounts targeting different demographics, ensure “healthy content” for elderly and children, and impose a robust “algorithm review mechanism and data security management system”.

Tech companies have been told to “conduct in-depth self-examination and rectification to further improve the security capabilities of algorithms” by the end of the year.

I'm in the mood to watch something longer-form than a movie. What are your favourite english-language miniseries? Either fiction or documentary is OK, so long as it has a definitive and satisfying ending if a work of fiction.

BEIJING, Nov. 21 (Xinhua) -- An inflatable capsule has passed its in-orbit flight test aboard China's Shijian-19 satellite, according to the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) on Thursday.

The test was a complete success, CAST said.

The inflatable capsule is a new, multi-functional type of sealed capsule composed of a flexible skin. It is compressed and folded during launch, and unfolded and inflated after entering orbit.

It is lightweight and has a high folding efficiency, making it an effective way to build large sealed capsules in space.

During its carrying technology verification test, the product underwent an environmental assessment of its launch process and successfully completed a series of flight actions, including unlocking, inflating, unfolding and maintaining pressure.

Indicators such as capsule body bearing capacity, airtightness performance and interior capsule temperature met their technical verification expectations.

The technological achievements of the inflatable capsule will provide technical support for China's major space projects, such as its space station and manned lunar landing projects, CAST said.

There's an invisible monster on the loose, barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. It's likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes.

Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, like a cosmic Pac-Man, the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor. The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

"We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. "What we're seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship we're seeing the wake behind the black hole." The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to.

The black hole lies at one end of the column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy. There is a remarkably bright knot of ionized oxygen at the outermost tip of the column. Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole. "Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. How it works exactly is not really known," said van Dokkum.

"This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it," van Dokkum added. He was looking for globular star clusters in a nearby dwarf galaxy. "I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak. I immediately thought, 'oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artifact.' When we eliminated cosmic rays we realized it was still there. It didn't look like anything we've seen before."

Because it was so weird, van Dokkum and his team did follow-up spectroscopy with the W. M. Keck Observatories

in Hawaii. He describes the star trail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual." This led to the conclusion that he was looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.

This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole.

Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole. This follows the old idiom: "two's company and three's a crowd." The three black holes mixing it up led to a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy. The original binary may have remained intact, or the new interloper black hole may have replaced one of the two that were in the original binary, and kicked out the previous companion.

When the single black hole took off in one direction, the binary black holes shot off in the opposite direction. There is a feature seen on the opposite side of the host galaxy that might be the runaway binary black hole. Circumstantial evidence for this is that there is no sign of an active black hole remaining at the galaxy’s core. The next step is to do follow-up observations with NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory to confirm the black hole explanation.

NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a wide-angle view of the universe with Hubble's exquisite resolution. As a survey telescope, the Roman observations might find more of these rare and improbable "star streaks" elsewhere in the universe. This may require machine learning using algorithms that are very good at finding specific weird shapes in a sea of other astronomical data, according to van Dokkum.

The research paper will be published on April 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.

China has unveiled the design of a new reusable shuttle to take cargo to and from the country's space station.

The Haolong space shuttle is being developed by the Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute under the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). It is one of two winning projects stemming from a call for proposals from China's human spaceflight agency, CMSA, to develop low-cost cargo spacecraft.

China currently uses its robotic Tianzhou spacecraft to send cargo to the Tiangong space station. But, taking a leaf out of NASA's book to encourage commercial resupply options for the International Space Station, CMSA wanted new, low-cost ideas that can also return experiments and other cargo to Earth, unlike the Tianzhou, which burns up on reentry.

Haolong will launch atop of a rocket and land horizontally on Earth on a runway. The space shuttle measures 32.8 feet (10 meters) long and 26.2 feet (8 m) wide, and weighs less than half of the Tianzhou capsule, which has a mass of up to 31,000 pounds (14,000 kilograms). The winged spacecraft is now in the engineering flight verification phase, meaning its design and systems are under review before being built.

(Update: the video seems not to work for me, but I found the right video on youtube showing how a flight would work.)

tl;dr: One of the most critical steps in development of a rapidly and completely reusable rocket just worked perfectly on its first test in the real world: midair catching of the biggest booster rocket ever back at its launch tower.

Okay, I'll start with the usual caveat that all my respect for what is happening within SpaceX is solely for the engineers and technicians and scientists doing the actual work and not for the know-nothing shithead who owns most of it. And that my excitement for the problem is solely for the scientific breakthroughs that can come from having a cheap and reusable super-heavy-lift rocket available.

The link is for a reputable spaceflight youtube channel doing commentary on the launch, as SpaceX is now required by the shithead-in-chief to only stream video on twitter/x. If you'd like a palate cleanser, the same channel presenter did a highly complimentary 94-minute in-depth documentary about the history of Soviet rocket engines. And he loves Soyuz.

The background: Starship/Super Heavy is the first attempt ever to build a rapidly and completely reusable launch system. It comes in two components: Super Heavy, the 10-metre-wide, 70-metre-tall, 33-engine booster. And Starship, the 10-metre-wide 50-metre-tall 6-engine ship that rides on top of it.

The booster and launch tower are designed for rapid turnaround, like a jetliner at an airport. Launch, return, do a systems check, refuel, and launch again within a few hours. To make this work they have to minimize the time spent moving a landed booster from its landing site to the launch tower. So why not just have the launch tower catch the returning booster mid-air? That saves all the time and equipment needed to set up the booster again. Insane, right? But this morning they proved that it works. It worked on their first try ever. This is one of the massive early R&D wins that can take years off a development schedule. Now that they know this method definitely works with this tower design, they can build more launch towers of the same design and rapidly accelerate more launch tests.

And the Starship on top also did its job. It flew most of the way around the world, testing re-entry systems before doing a soft intact splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Until it exploded afterwards, but hey, it's a prototype!

It's hard to overstate what all this can mean for space science down the road. First, a Starship variant is NASA's official lunar landing vehicle for the Artemis program. Or we could launch mass quantities of mass-produced probes and landers everywhere really cheaply, instead of one-offs every few years and having to have academic fights over where to send them and what instruments to include. We could put huge radio telescopes on the far side of the Moon where Earth's radio noise is completely blocked. We could put extrasolar-asteroid interceptors in orbit, ready to chase the ultrafast visiting interstellar rocks with massive fuel drop tanks. There's all sorts of science possibilities that open up when the cost of launch a hundred tonnes to low Earth orbit goes from several billion dollars to just several million.

(Again, see caveat at the top. I'm just in it for the science.)

One country that he doesn't mention?

Ukraine.

One country that he does mention?

Palestine.

Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away, on my way to where the air is sweet!

There's more than one definition of "engineer".

For those who don't know, Larry Ellison runs the tech company Oracle, and is consistently in the list of top-five wealthiest people in the world.