Elon Musk finishes digging Las Vegas 'Loop' train amid Covid-19 crisis

A giant drill called Godot Plus broke through a wall near the spot where it will connect to the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Not all of Elon Musk’s projects have been thwarted by the coronavirus pandemic. While the billionaire clashed this week with local officials over restarting production at a Tesla factory in California, his tunnel-drilling company hit a new milestone.

A giant drill called Godot Plus broke through a wall near the spot where it will connect to the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The event marked the final phase of excavation for the project’s two main transportation tunnels and will allow Musk’s Boring to collect its next portion of a total $48.7 million in payment from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

“From a construction standpoint, we’re comfortably in the schedule,” said Steve Hill, the authority’s chief executive officer. In fact, he said Boring Co. is “somewhat ahead,” making him confident that the company’s planned transportation network will be open to the public on time, by January.

The milestone comes just one year after the LVCVA approved the project, and the completion of both tunnels signals remarkably speedy progress for major infrastructure construction.

Facebook makes strides against online abuses ahead of Lok Sabha polls

However, the social media giant acknowledged that gaps remain in its "election integrity" efforts.

Business Standard : Facebook has said it has made strides in its efforts to prevent online abuses in the Indian national election that starts this week but acknowledged that gaps remain in its "election integrity" efforts.

During a media tour of the company's election operations centre at its Menlo Park headquarters in California on Friday, company officials touted new fact-checking efforts for suppressing misinformation and technological advances such as the ability to detect when videos had been doctored.

But Katie Harbath, Facebook's public policy director for global elections, said measures including a better system for verifying the buyers of political advertisements remained imperfect and called for more government regulation of ad-spending disclosures.

Excoriated for failing to stop Russian manipulation in the 2016 U.S. presidential vote, Facebook has ramped up efforts to prevent abuses in subsequent elections, including the 2018 American midterms and the recent Brazilian and Mexican contests. Governments in many countries, including India and the UK, are contemplating strict new regulations for social media companies.

India, where Facebook has more users than in any other country, is shaping up as a major test. On April 1, the company said it had removed more than 500 accounts and 138 pages linked to India's opposition Congress party for "coordinated inauthentic behavior," Facebook's term for the use of fake accounts and other deceptive methods to promote a message.

It also took down a page with 2 million followers which, according to Facebook's review partner Atlantic Council think tank, was "pro-BJP" (the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party) and a supporter of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Harbath said the company can now quickly detect viral, politically sensitive stories and refer them for fact-checking by outside organizations. The officials also touted heavy investment in technology for detecting doctored videos and text inside pictures, but acknowledged that they have been unable to stop some duplicates of videos that have been identified as spurious.

Facebook has partnered with seven fact-checkers in India. If a post is found to be untrue, the company says it reduces the circulation of such fake posts by more than 80 percent, but slightly modified versions of the same images, video or text can escape detection and spread further.

Reuters earlier this month found instances of edited posts circulating on Facebook which the company's own fact-checkers had said were false.

Facebook rules out cyber attack after its family of apps suffers outage

According to the website downdetector.com, outages were heaviest in North America and Europe, but some users appeared to be affected in other regions.

Facebook and Instagram users lost access to the social network's applications in parts of the world Wednesday as a result of an outage of undetermined origin.

The California giant which has more than two billion users acknowledged the outage after users noted on Twitter they could not access Facebook or had limited functionality.

"We're aware that some people are currently having trouble accessing the Facebook family of apps. We're working to resolve the issue as soon as possible," a Facebook statement said on Twitter.

A short time later, Facebook indicated the outage was not related to an attack aimed at overwhelming the network.

"We're focused on working to resolve the issue as soon as possible, but can confirm that the issue is not related to a DDoS attack," Facebook said, referring to what is known as a distributed denial of service cyber strike.

According to the website downdetector.com, outages were heaviest in North America and Europe, but some users appeared to be affected in other regions.

Last November, a Facebook outage was attributed to a server problem and a September 2018 outage was said to be the result of "networking issues.

Business Standard

Nasa launching laser satellite today to study Earth's changing ice

ICESat-2 will improve upon NASA's 15-year record of monitoring the change in polar ice heights.

NASA is launching a laser-armed satellite next month that will measure -- in unprecedented detail -- changes in the heights of Earth's polar ice to understand what is causing ice sheets to melt fast.

In recent years, contributions of melt from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica alone have raised global sea level by more than a millimeter a year, accounting for approximately one-third of observed sea level rise, and the rate is increasing.

Called the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), the mission is scheduled to be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on September 15, NASA said in a statement late on Thursday.

ICESat-2 will measure the average annual elevation change of land ice covering Greenland and Antarctica to within the width of a pencil, capturing 60,000 measurements every second.

"The new observational technologies of ICESat-2 will advance our knowledge of how the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica contribute to sea level rise," said Michael Freilich, Director of the Earth Science Division in NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

ICESat-2 will improve upon NASA's 15-year record of monitoring the change in polar ice heights.

It started in 2003 with the first ICESat mission and continued in 2009 with NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne research campaign that kept track of the accelerating rate of change.

ICESat-2's Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) measures height by timing how long it takes individual light photons to travel from the spacecraft to Earth and back.

"ATLAS required us to develop new technologies to get the measurements needed by scientists to advance the research," said Doug McLennan, ICESat-2 Project Manager.

"That meant we had to engineer a satellite instrument that not only will collect incredibly precise data, but also will collect more than 250 times as many height measurements as its predecessor," he added.

ATLAS will fire 10,000 times each second, sending hundreds of trillions of photons to the ground in six beams of green light.

With so many photons returning from multiple beams, ICESat-2 will get a much more detailed view of the ice surface than its predecessor.

As it circles Earth from pole to pole, ICESat-2 will measure ice heights along the same path in the polar regions four times a year, providing seasonal and annual monitoring of ice elevation changes.

Beyond the poles, ICESat-2 will also measure the height of ocean and land surfaces, including forests.

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