Check out this video footage of the sleek Mayflower 400 slicing through the water, hoping to retrace the historic 1620 journey of the famous ship which carried pilgrims to America. Unfortunately, unlike the real Mayflower, this robotic 21st-century doppelganger "had to turn back Friday to fix a mechanical problem," reports the Associated Press: Nonprofit marine research organization ProMare, which worked with IBM to build the autonomous ship, said it made the decision to return to base "to investigate and fix a minor mechanical issue" but hopes to be back on the trans-Atlantic journey as soon as possible. With no humans on board the ship, there's no one to make repairs while it's at sea. Piloted by artificial intelligence technology, the 50-foot (15-meter) Mayflower Autonomous Ship began its trip early Tuesday, departing from Plymouth, England, and spending some time off the Isles of Scilly before it headed for deeper waters. It was supposed to take up to three weeks to reach Provincetown on Cape Cod before making its way to Plymouth, Massachusetts. If successful, it would be the largest autonomous vessel to cross the Atlantic.

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The U.S. government spent more than $18 billion last year funding drugmakers to make a Covid vaccine, an effort that led to at least five highly effective shots in record time. Now it's pouring more than $3 billion on a neglected area of research: developing pills to fight the virus early in the course of infection, potentially saving many lives in the years to come. From a report: The new program, announced on Thursday by the Department of Health and Human Services, will speed up the clinical trials of a few promising drug candidates. If all goes well, some of those first pills could be ready by the end of the year. The Antiviral Program for Pandemics will also support research on entirely new drugs -- not just for the coronavirus, but for viruses that could cause future pandemics. A number of other viruses, including influenza, H.I.V. and hepatitis C, can be treated with a simple pill. But despite more than a year of research, no such pill exists to treat someone with a coronavirus infection before it wreaks havoc. Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's program for accelerating Covid-19 research, invested far more money in the development of vaccines than of treatments, a gap that the new program will try to fill. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key backer of the program, said he looked forward to a time when Covid-19 patients could pick up antiviral pills from a pharmacy as soon as they tested positive for the coronavirus or develop Covid-19 symptoms. "I wake up in the morning, I don't feel very well, my sense of smell and taste go away, I get a sore throat," Dr. Fauci said in an interview. "I call up my doctor and I say, 'I have Covid and I need a prescription.'" Dr. Fauci's support for research on antiviral pills stems from his own experience fighting AIDS three decades ago. In the 1990s, his institute conducted research that led to some of the first antiviral pills for H.I.V., "protease inhibitors" that block an essential virus protein and can keep the virus at bay for a lifetime.

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The number of new wildfires in the U.S. so far this year is at a ten-year high, according to federal data, prompting warnings of a long, potentially dangerous summer of fire. From a report: One of the biggest areas of concern right now is the high desert Great Basin region in Utah, Nevada and eastern Oregon. "When you have standing dead grass that's already out there and when we have high heat, that ignition potential raises dramatically," said Paul Peterson, a fire management officer for the Bureau of Land Management. Since January, more than a million acres have burned from more than 28,000 wildfires â" the highest number of fires for this date since 2011. There are currently 33 active large fires across the West. The biggest has scorched more than 175,000 acres in the canyons and valleys east of Phoenix. It is 73% contained. A record-breaking heat wave across the West this week isn't helping ease fire danger. Temperatures have soared into the triple digits in Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Montana, where new wildfires are sparking weeks earlier than normal.

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Google is developing an alternative to the industry standard method for classifying skin tones, which a growing chorus of technology researchers and dermatologists says is inadequate for assessing whether products are biased against people of color. From a report: At issue is a six-color scale known as Fitzpatrick Skin Type (FST), which dermatologists have used since the 1970s. Tech companies now rely on it to categorize people and measure whether products such as facial recognition systems or smartwatch heart-rate sensors perform equally well across skin tones. Critics say FST, which includes four categories for "white" skin and one apiece for "black" and "brown," disregards diversity among people of color. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, during a federal technology standards conference last October, recommended abandoning FST for evaluating facial recognition because it poorly represents color range in diverse populations. In response to Reuters' questions about FST, Google, for the first time and ahead of peers, said that it has been quietly pursuing better measures.

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Immortality and everlasting youth are the stuff of myths, according to new research which may finally end the eternal debate about whether we can live for ever. From a report: Backed by governments, business, academics and investors in an industry worth $110bn -- and estimated to be worth $610bn by 2025 -- scientists have spent decades attempting to harness the power of genomics and artificial intelligence to find a way to prevent or even reverse ageing. But an unprecedented study has now confirmed that we probably cannot slow the rate at which we get older because of biological constraints. The study, by an international collaboration of scientists from 14 countries and including experts from the University of Oxford, set out to test the "invariant rate of ageing" hypothesis, which says that a species has a relatively fixed rate of ageing from adulthood. "Our findings support the theory that, rather than slowing down death, more people are living much longer due to a reduction in mortality at younger ages," said Jose Manuel Aburto from Oxford's Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, who analysed age-specific birth and death data spanning centuries and continents. "We compared birth and death data from humans and non-human primates and found this general pattern of mortality was the same in all of them," said Aburto. "This suggests that biological, rather than environmental factors, ultimately control longevity. The statistics confirmed, individuals live longer as health and living conditions improve which leads to increasing longevity across an entire population. Nevertheless, a steep rise in death rates, as years advance into old age, is clear to see in all species."

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Boston-headquartered security firm Cybereason's study has found that the majority of organizations that chose to pay ransom demands in the past were not immune to subsequent ransomware attacks, often by the same threat actors. From a report: In fact, 80% of organizations that paid the ransom were hit by a second attack, and almost half were hit by the same threat group. This study offers insight into the business impact of ransomware attacks across key industry verticals and reveals data that can be leveraged to improve ransomware defenses. For example, after an organization experienced a ransomware attack, the top two solutions implemented included security awareness training (48%) and security operations (48%). This research underscores that prevention is the best strategy for managing ransomware risk and ensuring your organization does not fall victim to a ransomware attack in the first place.

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Oregon is now the third state in the US to allow a deathcare option that's gaining popularity for its environmental benefits: human composting. From a report: Gov. Katie Brown signed House Bill 2574 into law on Tuesday, adding natural organic reduction to the range of approved after-life options in the west coast state. Sponsored and developed by Rep. Pam Marsh (D - Southern Jackson County), the bill met Oregonians' growing interest in sustainable alternatives to traditional deathcare. "This is a hard issue for people to think about; it's not a decision that any of us get to avoid," Marsh told Motherboard over the phone. "It has an appeal, certainly not to all consumers, but to many of us who are really looking for ways to think about how our footprint on the earth continues after life is gone." The move heeds a growing call from environmentalists across the country to clean up the end-of-life industry. The most common methods of body disposal come with hefty environmental impacts: traditional burials, in which a corpse is embalmed with formaldehyde and placed in a casket underground, permanently occupy large swaths of land and have been found to leach toxins into nearby soil and waterways. Cremation -- in which a body is burned into ash -- is an energy suck and emits damaging pollutants and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. The move follows Washington passing a similar law in 2019 and Colorado last month.

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The Polish government said that a recent wave of cyberattacks that have targeted the email accounts of local political figures originated from Russia. From a report: The attacks have targeted some of the most important Polish officials, ministers, and deputies from various political parties, said Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland's deputy prime minister, citing sources from the Polish Internal Security Agency and the Military Counterintelligence Service. "The analysis of our services and the special services of our allies allows for a clear statement that the cyber attack was carried out from the territory of the Russian Federation," Kaczynski said in a press release today. "Its scale and range are wide," the Polish official said. The announcement today comes after Polish local news outlets reported last week hackers broke into the email inbox of Michal Dworczyk, head of the Chancellery of the Polish Prime Minister's. Throughout the course of the last week, the hackers leaked emails and documents from Dworczyk's inbox on a Telegram channel, according to Polish online news outlet Onet. Other documents were also leaked through the Facebook account of Dworczyk's wife.

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A new computer simulation shows that a technologically advanced civilization, even when using slow ships, can still colonize an entire galaxy in a modest amount of time. The finding presents a possible model for interstellar migration and a sharpened sense of where we might find alien intelligence. From a report: Space, we are told time and time again, is huge, and that's why we have yet to see signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. For sure, the distances between stars are vast, but it's important to remember that the universe is also very, very old. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that, in terms of extremes, the Milky Way galaxy is more ancient than it is huge, if that makes sense. It's for this reason that I tend to dismiss distances as a significant variable when discussing the Fermi Paradox -- the observation that we have yet to see any evidence for the existence of alien intelligence, even though we probably should have. New research published in The American Astronomical Society is bolstering my conviction. The new paper, co-authored by Jason Wright, an astronomer and astrophysicist at Penn State, and Caleb Scharf, an astrobiologist at Columbia University, shows that even the most conservative estimates of civilizational expansion can still result in a galactic empire. A simulation produced by the team shows the process at work, as a lone technological civilization, living in a hypothetical Milky Way-like galaxy, begins the process of galactic expansion. Grey dots in the visualization represent unsettled stars, magenta spheres represent settled stars, and the white cubes are starships in transit. The computer code and the mathematical analysis for this was project were written at the University of Rochester by Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback. Astronomer Adam Frank from the University of Rochester also participated in the study.

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California on Friday started offering residents a digital record of their coronavirus vaccinations that they can use to access businesses or events that require proof they got the shots. From a report: The state's public health and technology departments said the new tool allows Californians access to their COVID-19 vaccination records from the state's immunization registry and includes the same information as the paper cards issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To access the information, Californians will enter into a state website their name, date of birth and email or phone associated with their vaccine records and they will be asked to create a four-digit PIN. The record will include a QR code that users can save to their mobile phones. With nearly 20 million people fully vaccinated in California and proof of vaccination already required in some circumstances such as travel, state health officials felt there would be demand for the tool, though it remains optional, said Dr. Erica Pan, the state's epidemiologist.

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EPA is out with its latest tally of buildings certified through the Energy Star efficiency program it runs with the Energy Department. From a report: Commercial and multifamily buildings are a big source of energy demand and carbon emissions. The chart shows the ranking of large cities, and this page has more about those, and smaller cities, too.

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If someone created a flying machine capable of tracking you down by listening for your voice, you might be creeped out. But what if you were pinned under a pile of rubble after a natural disaster and first responders couldn't locate you? Maybe then a human-seeking drone wouldn't be such a terrible idea. From a report: That concept is the focus for engineers at Germany's Fraunhofer FKIE institute, who've built a drone prototype designed to find people by detecting human screams and listening for other signs of distress. One of the lead engineers, Macarena Varela, showcased their progress last week at an annual conference hosted by the Acoustic Society of America. While it's easy to imagine human-seeking drones in a sci-fi horror movie, Varela says the gadget would be ideal for post-disaster scenarios, such as earthquakes, hurricanes and wildfires. They could hover over an area that rescue crews have difficulty getting to and pinpoint where people may be trapped. "[Drones] can cover a larger area in a shorter period of time than rescuers or trained dogs on the ground," Varela said. "If there's a collapsed building, it can alert and assist rescuers. It can go places they can't fly to or get to themselves." Unmanned aerial vehicles or drones are commonly used for search-and-rescue missions when disasters strike. Most often, they take aerial images of structural damage. Some have thermal imaging capabilities to scan for body heat, while larger drones can deliver medical supplies and other goods to people in isolated areas. But researchers are finding more novel uses for an extra set of eyes in the sky -- and noses. The University of Washington imagines drones that use smell to locate disaster survivors. The Aerospace Corporation is working on drones that can visually identify dogs and share their location with rescue teams. The University of Zurich developed a drone to change shape midflight to fit into oddly shaped crevices. Locating people using aerial acoustics presents its share of challenges. An auditory system would need to decipher between human cries and sounds that often happen in nature, such as animal calls and wind. It might also need to recognize patterns associated with kicking, clapping or other ways people try to get the attention of rescue teams.

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The Earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005, according to new research, described as an "unprecedented" increase amid the climate crisis. From a report: Scientists from NASA, the US space agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), reported in a new study that Earth's "energy imbalance approximately doubled" from 2005 to 2019. The increase was described as "alarming." "Energy imbalance" refers to the difference between how much of the Sun's "radiative energy" is absorbed by Earth's atmosphere and surface, compared to how much "thermal infrared radiationâ bounces back into space. "A positive energy imbalance means the Earth system is gaining energy, causing the planet to heat up," NASA said in a statement about this study. Scientists determined there was an energy imbalance by comparing data from satellite sensors -- which track how much energy enters and exits Earth's system -- and data from ocean floats. This system of data-gathering floats, which stretches across the globe, allows for "an accurate estimate of the rate at which the world's oceans are heating up." Because about 90% of excess energy from an imbalance winds up in the ocean, the satellite sensors' data should correspond with temperature changes in oceans.

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Alphabet unit Google could face its biggest regulatory threat, with EU antitrust regulators set to open a formal investigation into its lucrative digital advertising business before the end of the year, said people familiar with the matter. From a report: It would mark a new front by the EU competition enforcer against Google. It has in the last decade fined the company more than 8 billion euros ($9.8 billion) for blocking rivals in online shopping, Android smartphones and online advertising. An EU probe would focus on Google's position vis-a-vis advertisers, publishers, intermediaries and rivals, one of the people said, indicating deeper scrutiny than the French antitrust agency's case concluded last week. Google made $147 billion in revenue from online ads last year, more than any other company in the world. Ads on its properties, including search, YouTube and Gmail, accounted for the bulk of sales and profits. About 16% of revenue came from its display or network business, in which other media companies use Google technology to sell ads on their website and apps.

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The annual video game convention E3 is normally full of teasers for splashy, graphic-rich games from big-name studios and surprise announcements about new titles. But this year's online-only event was much quieter, with many hot releases delayed as a result of the pandemic. That gave games from independent studios a chance to steal the show. From a report: Some of the most impressive reveals this year were small-scale, indie games that may not have the wow factor of something like Ubisoft Entertainment SA's Assassin's Creed but appealed to fans with interesting story lines, quirky graphics or unusual gameplay. Highlights included Replaced, a gorgeous cyberpunk-themed action game and debut title from Sad Cat Studios, and Twelve Minutes, in which players must break a time loop full of betrayal and murder. The game, from a division of film company Annapurna Pictures, stars Daisy Ridley and Willem Dafoe. Entries like these delighted fans and showcased the breadth of possibilities of video games. Most years, E3 takes place in Los Angeles, where fans and industry professionals convene at the convention center to play demos and watch trailers for the hottest new games. Commercials and giant posters from expensive series like Call of Duty compete for attendees' eyeballs, and fans come away excited about what's coming in the fall. This year, while there will be Microsoft's Halo Infinite, promised in time for the holidays after a year's delay, Nintendo's highly anticipated next game in the Zelda series won't come until next year. Same with Elden Ring, a much-hyped dark fantasy based on the book that inspired Game of Thrones. Fans didn't seem to mind, and left the show raving instead about Tunic, a Zelda-inspired action-adventure game starring a small fox developed by Canadian creator Andrew Shouldice, and Neko Ghost, Jump, a platforming game from Burgos Games, in which you can shift between 2D and 3D perspectives. This explosion of independent games, which are usually made by small teams that aren't funded by multi-billion-dollar corporations like Electronic Arts, or Activision Blizzard, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until the late 2000s, developers mostly had to partner with big publishers to get their games to audiences. The rise of digital distribution on PCs and consoles combined with the increased accessibility of game-making tools such as the Unity Engine have made it easy for solo developers, or two or three people working in a garage, to release successful games on their own. Some companies, such as Annapurna Interactive and Devolver Digital, have thrived as independent publishers, partnering with developers to release exclusively small, creative games.

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Google has open-sourced a collection of C++ libraries for implementing Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) in modern applications. From a report: Fully homomorphic encryption, or simply homomorphic encryption, is a form of data encryption that allows users/applications to perform mathematical computations on encrypted data without decrypting it first, keeping the data's privacy intact. While the concept of homomorphic encryption has been around since 1978, when it was first described at a theoretical level, and 2009, when it was first implemented in practice, it has not been broadly adopted in software due to its complexity, advanced cryptography techniques, and lack of open-source code and public documentation. However, despite this, today, FHE is a hot technology in software design. FHE allows software vendors to work on encrypted data without sharing the encryption/decryption keys with untrustworthy systems such as client-side apps or publicly-hosted web servers, where the keys could be stolen or intercepted by malware or malicious human operators. FHE allows developers to keep data secure, encrypted, and private, all at the same time, and Google hopes that developers will use its FHE libraries as the first step into adopting this new type of encryption technology within their applications.

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SpaceX successfully launched an advanced GPS satellite for the U.S. Space Force on Thursday (June 17), marking the 19th launch of the year here on the Space Coast. From a report: One of the company's two-stage Falcon 9 rockets blasted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here at 12:09 p.m. EST (1409 GMT), carrying the GPS III SV05 navigation satellite to orbit. Nine minutes later, the rocket's first stage touched down on the deck of "Just Read the Instructions," one of SpaceX's two drone ships. "What a beautiful view of the first stage landing," Youmei Zhou, a SpaceX propulsion engineer, said during the company's live launch commentary. The GPS III SV05 satellite mission is the second to launch so far this month for SpaceX, following the launch of a broadband satellite for Sirius XM on June 6. It was nothing but blue skies over the launch pad, and onlookers were treated to a gorgeous view as the rocket climbed to orbit. Today's flight marks the fourth GPS satellite delivery by SpaceX for the U.S. military. Three previous advanced GPS III missions also launched on Falcon 9 rockets, including two missions last year. Another of the satellites launched in August 2019 on the United Launch Alliance's final flight of the Delta IV Medium rocket. "If you've ever used your phone's mapping service or retrieved a location via a pin drop, you've used a satellite in this system," Zhou said.

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The Senate on Thursday confirmed Chris Inglis to be President Joe Biden's national cyber director, installing the former NSA deputy director as Biden's top cyber adviser at a time when many lawmakers are pressing the White House for a muscular response to a series of high-profile hacks. From a report: As head of the new Office of the National Cyber Director inside the White House, Inglis will coordinate federal agencies' disparate work on cyber issues and oversee the development of the U.S.' digital defense strategy. The Senate confirmed Inglis on a voice vote one day after the Homeland Security Committee unanimously approved his nomination. The recent ransomware attacks on Colonial Pipeline and the meat processing giant JBS, both attributed to Russian cybercrime gangs, as well as the SolarWinds espionage campaign that intelligence agencies linked to Moscow, thrust cybersecurity into the spotlight on Capitol Hill and prompted renewed scrutiny of the challenges facing the federal government, including its limited understanding of attacks on private companies.

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The Biden administration Thursday unveiled a new mapping tool that shows much greater gaps in use of high-speed internet service across the U.S. than the government's previous maps reported. From a report: The White House is pushing for big spending to provide more, better broadband service to underserved areas after the pandemic made Americans more dependent than ever on their internet connections. The new, zoomable map draws on a wider pool of data than existing maps by the Federal Communications Commission, which relied exclusively on industry-provided data that overstated broadband penetration. The map raises questions about the gap between internet availability and actual usage, with usage reports indicating wide swaths of the country are not making a home broadband connection. The new "Indicators of Broadband Need" map, developed by the White House and the telecommunications branch of the Commerce Department, pulls together different data sets from Ookla, M-Lab, Microsoft, the Federal Communications Commission and the Census Bureau. The overlapping data points are meant to paint a picture of the areas that need more, better broadband. The map also includes data on places that reported a lack of connection by computer, smartphone or tablet and information on broadband usage in high-poverty communities.

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Police in Ukraine said this week they arrested members of a major ransomware gang. From a report: The arrests mark the first time a law enforcement agency has announced a mass arrest of a prolific hacker group that had extorted Americans by either encrypting an organization's files or threatening to leak them to the public. The gang, known as Cl0p, has hacked a number of American targets, including the University of Miami, Florida, Stanford University, University of Maryland, and University of Colorado, demanding a payment to either keep their systems functional or to not publish material they were able to steal. The bust comes as ransomware has gone from a quietly pervasive cybersecurity problem to a broadly discussed national security issue, thanks to a series of high-profile attacks that have threatened to cripple some U.S. supply chains. Ukraine's announcement coincided with President Joe Biden's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva. Biden is expected to press Putin to take action against ransomware hackers who operate with impunity within Russia's borders. Ransomware has become a significant problem in the United States. Recent ransomware attacks briefly hobbled the Colonial Pipeline, shutting down the country's largest fuel pipeline for five days, and JBS, one of the country's largest meat suppliers. The majority of the most prolific ransomware gangs are believed to operate in Eastern Europe, and Russia in particular. Ukraine's cyber police announced they had arrested six people involved with Cl0p, and seized a number of computers, cars and about 5 million Ukrainian hryvnia ($185,000) in cash.

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