Month: February 2022

Enlarge / The EVGA RTX 3060, as posed in front of some sort of high-tech honeycomb array. (credit: EVGA / Nvidia)

Both Nvidia and AMD have made changes to their gaming GPU lineups in an effort to make them less appealing to cryptocurrency miners, including releasing mining-specific GPU models and making entry-level GPUs with specs that aren’t good enough for mining. One of the most significant changes came in mid-2021, when Nvidia released “Lite Hash Rate” (LHR) versions of its RTX 3000-series GPUs that halved their performance when mining Ethereum or similar coins but didn’t affect their gaming performance.

Cryptocurrency miners have tried to circumvent the LHR limitations in a bunch of ways since then, including by using non-LHR drivers that Nvidia leaked (oops!) and flashing the BIOSes from 3090-series cards onto 3080-series cards to bump up the hash-rate limit. And earlier this week, a hacker by the name of Sergey released an “Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker” that promised to remove the hash-rate limits on most Nvidia cards using a combination of BIOS updates and specially modified drivers.

Surprising no one, the sketchy drivers with the too-good-to-be-true performance promises turned out to be full of viruses. An extensive report shows that the software package modifies Windows Powershell policies, deletes and creates new files in system directories, and causes abnormally high CPU usage, among other things.

Enlarge / Kimbal Musk at the ETHDenver conference in Denver, Colorado, on Friday, Feb. 18, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his brother, Kimbal Musk, violated insider-trading rules with recent stock sales, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

“The SEC’s investigation began last year after Kimbal Musk sold shares of Tesla valued at $108 million, one day before the Tesla chief polled Twitter users asking whether he should unload 10 percent of his stake in the electric-car maker and pledging to abide by the vote’s results,” the Journal wrote.

Separately, a US judge yesterday denied Tesla and Musk’s various requests related to their claim that the SEC is “harassing” the company and its CEO. (More on that later in this article.)

Enlarge / Not one, but two Electron rockets on Rocket Lab’s launch pads in New Zealand. (credit: Rocket Lab)

Welcome to Edition 4.33 of the Rocket Report! Let me apologize about the lack of a report last week—I injured my wrist pretty badly and for a few days had to type with one hand. This is not conducive for writing and editing a newsletter that often runs more than 2,000 words. Also, there are an immense number of things happening on space and Earth, particularly with Russia and Ukraine and the West. I’m working on a story about the ways in which spaceflight could be affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, so look for a story on that sometime Friday. Hopefully.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Relativity Space to move quickly to Aeon-R engine.
To power its first Terran 1 rocket, Relativity Space is developing a small engine called Aeon 1. But the company only plans on using it for a few flights. Instead, Relativity plans to quickly perform a “block upgrade” for the Terran 1, which will serve as a bridge to the much larger, more capable Terran R rocket. “We’ve always envisioned Terran 1 being a development platform,” said Tim Ellis, the co-founder and chief executive of Relativity Space, in an interview with Ars. The California-based company, which seeks to 3D-print most of its rocket parts, is continuing to work toward the first launch of Terran 1 this year.

Enlarge / Lateral view of a skull found at the El Pendón site in Spain, showing signs of a primitive form of ear surgery. (credit: ÑFotógrafos Photography Study)

Archaeologists have excavated a 5,300-year-old skull from a Spanish tomb and determined that seven cut marks near the left ear canal are strong evidence of a primitive surgical procedure to treat a middle ear infection. That makes this the earliest known example of ear surgery yet found, according to the authors of a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. The Spanish team also identified a flint blade that may have been used as a cauterizing tool.

The excavation site is located in the Dolmen of El Pendón in Burgos, Spain, and consists of the remains of a megalithic monument dating back to the 4th century BCE, i.e., the late Neolithic period. The ruins include an ossuary holding the bones of nearly 100 people, and archaeologists have been excavating those remains since 2016.

In July 2018, the team recovered the skull that is the subject of this latest study. The skull was lying on its right side, facing the entrance of the burial chamber, and while most of the cranium was intact, no teeth remained. The missing teeth, plus the loss in bone density and fully ossified thyroid cartilage, indicated that this was the skull of an elderly woman aged 65 or older.

Enlarge / Artist’s conception of a high-energy burst coming off the surface of a magnetar. (credit: Goddard Space Flight Center)

Fast radio bursts were an enigma when they were first spotted. At first, each FRB followed the same pattern: a huge surge of energy in radio wavelengths that lasted less than a second—and then the burst was gone, never to repeat. We initially suspected FRBs might be hardware glitches in our detectors, but over time, the bursts’ recurrence convinced us that they were real.

Since then, we’ve identified sources of repeated bursts and associated the FRBs with a source that produces energy outside the radio range. This ultimately helped us point the finger at a single source: magnetars, or neutron stars that have extremely intense magnetic fields.

Now, reality has gone and thrown a monkey wrench in that nice and simple explanation. A new repeating source of FRBs has been identified, and it resides in a location where we wouldn’t expect to find any magnetars. This doesn’t mean that the source isn’t from a magnetar, but we have to resort to some unusual explanations for its formation.

Enlarge (credit: Roccat/Amazon)

For power users, gamers, and those seeking a highly functional mouse, more buttons is beneficial. Roccat wants to appeal to such people with its upcoming Kone XP, which has 15 buttons that can serve as 29 different inputs after programming via software.

Roccat’s announcement of the Kone XP today described the peripheral is “ideal” for MMOs and strategy games. But high programmability makes the Kone XP potentially appealing for advanced general use, too.

The programmable buttons are: left- and right-click, the scroll wheel (5 inputs: up, down, left, right, and in), the button south of the scroll wheel, two buttons near the left-click button, four side buttons, and a thumb button near the mouse’s base.