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NASA calls on the public to send their names on its Europa Clipper mission by Paul Hill Every now and again, NASA gets ready to launch a major mission into space and sometimes offers the public a chance to get their name sent into space. The organization has opened up another opportunity such as this. You now have the opportunity to send your name on NASA's upcoming Europa Clipper mission, which is set to land on Jupiter's second Galilean moon, Europa, in 2030. People’s names will accompany a poem called “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón. They will be stencilled onto a microchip and head off on the journey in October 2024. If you’re interested in including your name, you must add it to NASA’s website by December 31. Since the programme was announced on the evening of June 1, 2,767 people have added their names. The majority of these submissions are from the United States but names from all the continents have started coming in too. Within the United States, most signatures have come from California, Texas, Florida, and New York. "'Message in a Bottle' is the perfect convergence of science, art, and technology, and we are excited to share with the world the opportunity to be a part of Europa Clipper's journey," said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "I just love the thought that our names will be travelling across our solar system aboard the radiation-tolerant spacecraft that seeks to unlock the secrets of Jupiter's frozen moon." As mentioned, NASA has held similar programmes for its Artemis I mission to the moon and for several missions to Mars. While anyone is free to add their name, NASA will definitely be hoping that it piques the interest of children who may be more interested to pursue a job in the sciences as a result. In addition to adding your name, the website provides a world map that displays the locations where signatures are being added from. You can also find a live feed of the Clipper clean room to see work going on.

NASA announces huge upgrade with next-gen processors being "at least 100 times" faster by Sayan Sen The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), announced earlier today that it has big upgrade plans for its next generation processors. The space research body has hired chipmaker Microchip to design next-gen High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) processor which are "at least 100 times the computational capacity of current spaceflight computers". To make this possible, NASA is spending $50 million on this contract. The new system shall be deployed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. Aside from being blazingly fast, compared to last-gen technology that is 30 years old now, NASA says that the overall fault tolerance and reliability of the system has also improved. The efficiency of the new HPSC will also be much greater since it will allow disabling of certain processing functions when they are not being used. The press release explains: Microchip’s processor architecture will significantly improve the overall computing efficiency for these missions by enabling computing power to be scalable, based on mission needs. The design also will be more reliable and have a higher fault tolerance. The processor will enable spacecraft computers to perform calculations up to 100 times faster than today’s state-of-the-art space computers. NASA isn't the only space flight body looking to upgrade its aging computing equipment. Recently,the European Space Agency (ESA) also announced that it's going to upgrade its ancient Windows 98-based software. Source: NASA

Google researchers use deep reinforcement learning for optimizing chip design by Ather Fawaz Optimal chip design, or floorplanning, is a linchpin to increasing the computational power of today's systems. However, it is a process that takes substantial time, and efforts are being made to make it more efficient. Considering this, researchers working with Google have now looked towards machine learning to help tackle the problem. In a recent paper titled “Chip Placement with Deep Reinforcement Learning” published on arXiv, the team at Google poses chip placement as a reinforcement learning (RL) problem. The trained model then places chip blocks, each of which is an individual module, such as a memory subsystem, compute unit, or control logic system onto a chip canvas. Determining the layout of a chip block, a process called chip floorplanning, is one of the most complex and time-consuming stages of the chip design process and involves placing the netlist onto a chip canvas (a 2D grid), such that power, performance, and area (PPA) are minimized, while adhering to constraints on density and routing congestion. Despite decades of research on this topic, it is still necessary for human experts to iterate for weeks to produce solutions that meet multi-faceted design criteria. The input to the deep reinforcement learning model is the chip netlist, the ID of the current node to be placed, and some netlist metadata. The netlist graph and the current node are passed through an edge-based graph neural network to generate embeddings of the partially placed graph and the candidate node. A feed-forward neural network then takes this as a concatenated input to output a learned representation that captures the useful features and helps generate a probability distribution over all possible grid cells onto which the current node could be placed via a policy network. This entire process can be encapsulated in the GIF below. The chip on the left shows macro placement from scratch and on the right, some initial placements are being fine-tuned. With this setup, the researchers demonstrated an improvement in efficiency and placement quality, stating that for a process that would have taken several weeks for human experts, it was completed in under six hours with their trained ML model. Our objective is to minimize PPA (power, performance, and area), and we show that, in under 6 hours, our method can generate placements that are superhuman or comparable on modern accelerator netlists, whereas existing baselines require human experts in the loop and take several weeks. Moving forward, the team believes that its model demonstrates a potent automatic chip placement method that could greatly accelerate chip design, that too, for any chip placement problem, which would enable co-optimization with earlier stages of the chip design process as well.

BARRINGTON, N.H. ?A cat named Fuzzy was reunited with its owner that lost him four years ago in Barrington. The way the pair found each other is nothing short of a miracle. Michelle Wright thought she had seen the last of Fuzzy when he ran off from a friend's house in 2010. "One of her neighbors had told me that a black and white cat that resembled him had been struck by a car, which was extremely devastating. I was a mess for quite a while and I had given up for the most part," Wright said. But the cat came back. The Cocheco Valley Shelter brought Fuzzy to Pet Connections Pet Store two weeks ago. The store is just down the street from Wright's house and as fate would have it, she stopped in to buy something shortly after Fuzzy was dropped off. "And I had said to my husband, 'Wow, he looks an awful lot like Fuzzy.' And I asked how old he was and she said according to the shelter he was 4 years old. And at that very moment, I knew," Wright said. She told the store owners that she believed it was her cat. "Then she was really adamant about it like, 'That's my cat, I swear. That looks just like my cat, I'm going to have to bring in pictures,' and then the next day she brought in pictures and lo and behold, they matched up everything to the paw prints and colors and markings and everything," said owner Jesse Senter. A unique mark on Fuzzy's paw helped confirm his identity. Wright still had to go through the official adoption process of adopting her cat, which included paying an $85 fee, a small price to pay, she said, to get her beloved cat back. The $85 Wright paid to the Humane Society covered all of Fuzzy's shots and more importantly, it also bough her a chip that was implanted into his skin so he'll never be lost like that again. source & video

A southern California family reunited with their dog last month after he went missing in Arizona more than a year ago. The improbable reunion, they say, feels like a sign from above. Meko, the O?Brien :huh: family?s 4-year-old Brussels Griffon, vanished during a family vacation in Parker, Arizona. ?I woke up and I wondered where Meko was,? said 7-year-old Mady O?Brien. Her family looked for him everywhere, putting up signs and praying for his safe return. ?He was just gone,? said Mady?s mother, Dana. Mady was devastated never forgot her best friend. But everything changed in May, when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. ?It?s been a rough six months,? Dana O?Brien said. After an intense surgery, almost 30 chemotherapy and radiation treatments and countless hospital visits, Mady struggled to walk again. Last month, Dana O?Brien got a phone call as she and Mady were on their way to another round of chemotherapy. The Yavapai Humane Society was calling to say Meko had turned up on the streets of Prescott, Arizona. A microchip led volunteers to the O?Brien?s phone number, and James O?Brien made the 400-mile trek to pick him up. ?Meko?s back,? Mady said, smiling. For Mady?s parents, Meko?s return was more than just a story of a girl and her dog. They believe his return was one almost impossible prayer answered, and now they have one more to go. Mady O?Brien has three more rounds of chemotherapy at Children?s Hospital of Orange County. ?We can just move forward, it?s the start of things going right,? James said. ?This was, you know, kind of the answer that things are going to be okay,? Dana said. ?This was good news that our family had gotten and that it would be the start of more.? source & video

I've just had to switch from a dsPIC to a PIC18F4550 due to data size, and I think I might have found a problem... Using MPLABX IDE v1.85 and XC8 v1.20; It's telling me that my use of TRISC is wrong, and insists the only parts of TRISC that exist are TRISCbits.: TRISC0, TRISC1, TRISC2, TRISC6, TRISC7 I.e. no 3, 4, or 5... All of which are present in the datasheet. I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong or what, anyone else got a similar issue? Nevermind, fixed that, you use to use PORTC not LATC... Pretty stupid seeing as they're mapped to the same address... Also how the hell do you enable the extended CPU instructions? You enable it using the configuration bits but when you try and build it gives an error saying the program wasn't built with them! There's nothing in the whole of project settings that I can see to enable it either. Also anyone else having problems with neowin removing ALL formatting and making just a wad of text when they post?

A pit bull named Smoke is currently on a more than 2,500-mile journey home to California after disappearing three years ago and being found in Florida. And it has taken a nationwide, metaphorical "village" to get Smoke on the road back home. Smoke's story began three years ago when he was adopted by Eric Hough, a professional BMX rider who lives in Huntington Beach, Calif. Hough already had a Chihuahua mix when he adopted Smoke and tried to change his name to Bayou, which never really stuck. Everyone just called him "Big Boy." "For whatever reason, that dog and me bonded real fast and it was our family. It was the little dog, the big dog and me, and it was a more well-rounded family, at that point," Hough told ABCNews.com. "Suddenly, I was just some guy with a Chihuahua." About four months after adopting Smoke, Hough had to evict a problematic tenant subletting a room in his five-bedroom house. The day the female tenant left, Smoke disappeared. Hough believed that the woman took the dog after also establishing a bond with the canine. He called the police and even followed the woman hoping that she would lead him to the dog, but he never found Smoke. Fast forward to June 6, 2013, when authorities in Cocoa, Florida, found the black pit bull on the street and delivered him to a shelter as a stray. The shelter found that the dog had a microchip that electronically pulled up the name Eric Hough when scanned, but neither of the two phone numbers listed for him worked. When the shelter couldn't get ahold of Hough, Smoke was put up for adoption. A local woman who ran a website that tries to reunite pets with owners posted about Smoke online. One of the people to see the bulldog's story was Ryan Gamache, a Seattle-based "pet detective" who volunteers for a nonprofit group called Missing Pet Partnership. "I love those hard cases, so I picked it up," Gamache told ABCNews.com. "It took quite a bit of effort to find Eric, and then it was even harder to get him to sit down and listen." When Gamache couldn't get in touch with Hough directly, he tracked down people who know Hough. "When they started contacting me, it was through my sponsors and friends," Hough said. "I'm, like, immediately thinking they're trying to get information for identity theft." When Hough's sponsors told him that a man was trying to reach him about his missing dog, Hough initially thought about his Chihuahua, who was safe at home. He told the group to leave him alone. When Gamache heard Hough wasn't missing a dog, he asked him about the previous addresses that were attached to Smoke and the microchip. Hough realized the addresses were his. "I was like, 'Oh, wow. This is about me. Wait, is this about the pit bull?' And it suddenly just came back," he said, still shocked. "I was, like, two seconds away from losing the opportunity to ever get him back again. "I was literally talking about the pit bull the night before," he said. "I probably talked about him every week." From there, Heather McNally and a nonprofit volunteer group called Kindred Hearts stepped in. The group has volunteers across the country that help transport adopted and missing pets to their homes. The volunteers participate "totally from the kindness of their hearts," McNally told ABCNews.com. Hough said he volunteered to go pick up Smoke, but the trip would have cost him about $2,500 and the volunteers told him there was no need. She quickly mobilized the network of volunteers and broke the 2,500-mile trip from Florida to California into four days and 30 legs of driving. Each volunteer drove about an hour and a half and some volunteers signed up to spend the night with Smoke in motels or houses. Smoke's trip began on July 4 and he was scheduled to arrive home to Hough on Sunday night. McNally said that volunteers from the road have been checking in with her and she has heard from them at Smoke is "really adapting" and "a real sweetheart." "He cuddles up and goes on the next route," she said of his car-hopping. "People from all over the country that I've never met are doing all the driving for him," McNally said. "It's almost addicting. Once you do it once, you just want to do another. It feels so good to be able to help a dog." Gamache, the pet detective, even volunteered to drive a leg of the trip. He happened to be in California, so he cancelled his flight home in order to drive Smoke part of the way. "This is amazing how people have come together all the way across the United States, and I didn't expect it to be like this," he said. "It's inspiring to watch. A lot of our cases don't always have happy endings." Hough is at home eagerly anticipating the return of his dog so that his family can once again be whole. "I'm very thankful for the people helping," Hough said. "It's just amazing that we're getting him back." :happy: source & video

A California woman has finally found her beloved cat 13 years after she thought she lost him, thanks to a tiny microchip implanted under his skin. Jackie Sharp fell in love with her cat, Dallas, the very first time she saw him in the Petaluma, California, animal shelter. It was a few days before Christmas 1997, and the little ball of black fluff was only about two months old. "I was going through my first year of college (at Santa Rosa Junior College), and it was crazy and stressful," Sharp told her local newspaper, the Argus-Courier. "At the end of the day I would come home and he would just curl up on my lap and purr. He was always there for me. He got me through a lot." In 2000, she moved to Rohnert Park, California, where Dallas loved to explore the creek near her house. But one night, he didn't come home. "It was horrible," Sharp remembered. "I was looking everywhere for him. It was very sad. I loved that cat." She moved several times in the years that followed, but she kept photos of Dallas as a kitten and never stopped thinking about her dear pet. "Someone must have adopted him," she figured. "It's been so long? maybe he had passed away by now." So when the VCA Animal Care Center called last week, saying that they had her cat, she thought they had to be mistaken. All three of her cats were home with her right now, she said. And then she realized that they were talking about Dallas. "I was in shock," Sharp, now 34, said. "It has been 13 years. I figured he had found a new home or was gone by now." A man had found Dallas near the same creek that the cat had been exploring when he disappeared in 2000. He brought Dallas to Laurie Atwood, who feeds some of the feral cats living by the creek. Atwood brought the cat in to the Animal Center. Emergency veterinarians had noticed that the cat had a microchip implant, a tiny transponder about the size of a grain of rice, and looked up the information linked to it. There was a phone number ? Sharp's grandmother's, which was still the same after 13 years ? so they called. Dallas was near death. He needed a blood transfusion and spent days on a feeding tube ? measures that the veterinarians probably wouldn't have taken if they hadn't been able to locate his owner. "He was completely dehydrated and emaciated." Dr. Robin Schaffner, the veterinarian who treated Dallas, told the Argus-Courier. "He probably would have passed away within hours without aggressive treatment. The microchip saved his life." After several days at the Animal Center, Sharp was finally able to take Dallas, now 16, home again. Sharp says that they recognized each other right away, even after all that time apart. "It was so amazing," she said. "He was the coolest cat ever and I missed him so much." source & video

WEST PALM BEACH, FL ?The last time Jacob and Bonnie Richter saw their 4-year-old tortoiseshell cat Holly, she bolted out of their motor home at the Daytona International Speedway on Nov. 4, apparently frightened by fireworks. For days, the distraught couple searched for Holly, putting up flyers and alerting rescue agencies before despondently heading home to West Palm Beach. There was a brief glimmer of hope two weeks later when a rescue group spotted the distinctive cat outside of a Daytona Beach restaurant which fed feral cats. But before the Richters could drive there, Holly had disappeared. Then she showed up, skin and bones, paws rubbed raw and too exhausted to meow, in Barb Mazzola's Palm Beach Gardens yard. "She was pitiful. She just stood there, ready to collapse," said Mazzola, who rushed to the store for cat food and began feeding the cat she named Cosette. In a week, Holly was well enough to walk inside. Mazzola coaxed her into a cat carrier and took her to the vet, where she was scanned for a microchip. The chip came back to match the Richters, who got a call from the pet tracing agency Saturday. The couple couldn't believe it. Holly had traveled about 190 miles in 62 days. Since Holly was an inside cat, they had no idea how she found her way, ending up less than a mile from home. "It was quite a journey for this little girl," said Jacob Richter, holding his cat to his chest and breaking into tears. "We just can't believe she came home." :happy: source & video

They say cats have nine lives, and for one Siamese cat yesterday in San Francisco, after nine long, lost years, he was finally reunited with the people he shared his first life with. Vanilla the cat went missing from his owner, Dara Gerson, nine years ago in Sausalito, Calif., and was presumed to be lost forever. Despite Gerson?s and her daughters? efforts to find him, posting signs around the neighborhood and searching for days, the cat was nowhere to be found. ?We lived in Sausalito and my older daughter was holding the cat, and somebody had a dog that scared the cat and the cat ran out of her arms,? Gerson told ABCNews.com. ?We put up posters and asked everyone in the neighborhood and never found him. But we never gave up hope. I?m a pretty intuitive person and assumed he was still alive.? Vanilla was indeed alive, and had somehow over the years made his way across the Golden Gate Bridge to a home in Noe Valley, about six hours away from Gerson and her family. "We don?t know how he got Vanilla at all, but we took him into custody because his then owner wasn?t able to take care of him,? said Kristen Hall, a worker with Animal Care and Control. ?Whenever an animal comes in, we scan them for microchips. Vanilla had a microchip and it did not match up to the person he had been living with, which was the man that had been hospitalized. But it matched up to Dara, who had the same cellphone as all those years ago.? Since losing Vanilla, Gerson had moved to Topanga, Calif., but luckily had never changed her cellphone number that she registered to Vanilla?s microchip. She was elated to hear Vanilla had been found all these years later. more

PARIS (AP) ? A Jack Russell terrier has survived after being poisoned and buried alive ? and he can thank the man who saw the ground wiggle. Ethan had a whole chain of saviors: the man who dug him up, firefighters and a veterinarian who nursed him back to life. Sabrina Zamora, president of an animal association in Charleville-Mezieres, 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of Paris, said Friday the little dog was "flat as a pancake" Tuesday when he was dug up from his grave. Veterinarian Philippe Michon called the rescue "miraculous" ? saying that Ethan's cold body was so compressed from being buried it was hard to find a vein to hydrate him. Ethan was identified through a microchip that showed all this happened on his third birthday. :/ source