The Washington Post reports: After a top NASA official improperly contacted a senior Boeing executive about a bid to win a contract potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the company attempted to amend its proposal past the deadline for doing so, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That raised alarm bells inside the space agency, where officials were concerned that Boeing was attempting to take advantage of inside information. Ultimately, the matter was referred to NASA's inspector general office, and NASA's leadership last month forced Doug Loverro to resign from his position as the associate administrator of NASA's human spaceflight directorate. Boeing did not win one of the lucrative contracts to build a system capable of landing astronauts on the moon. But the inspector general investigation could be another headache for a company under fire for having an unusually cozy relationship with federal regulators, especially if it identifies wrongdoing on the part of Boeing senior executives... "It's one thing to have a mistake that violated the Integrity in Procurement Act," according to a congressional aide with knowledge of the matter. "It's another if the company took that information and acted on it."

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An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica: To some extent, every Internet user leaves a digital trail. So when a masked arsonist was seen on video setting fire to a police car on the day of a recent protest in Philadelphia, the fact that her face was hidden didn't prevent a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent from tracking down the suspect. The keys ended up being a tattoo and an Etsy review the alleged arsonist had left for a T-shirt she was wearing at the scene of the crime, according to the FBI... Even with video and photos, the FBI wasn't yet able to identify the suspect because her face wasn't visible. But the T-shirt she wore was unique and sold on Etsy, so FBI agents read the reviews on the seller's Etsy page to see if anyone from the Philadelphia area had purchased it. Blumenthal had left a 5-star review that said, "Fast shipping, thanks very much!" from her username "alleycatlore," and her Etsy profile displayed her location as Philadelphia, the affidavit said. The FBI did not yet have her full name, so they did a search for "alleycatlore" and found a user on the online fashion marketplace Poshmark "with a display name of 'lore-elisabeth,'" the affidavit said. A search for "Lore Elisabeth" in Philadelphia turned up "a LinkedIn profile... Pictures of the alleged arsonist showed a tattoo of a peace sign on her right forearm, and that tattoo was visible in a four-year-old video of Lore Elisabeth performing a massage on her business's website. The website had a phone number for Lore Elisabeth... From Lore Blumenthal's Etsy review of a T-shirt, her profiles on Poshmark and LinkedIn, and the tattoo visible on a video posted to her massage therapy website, the FBI found the details they needed to match the arsonist seen in photos and video to government records, the affidavit said... "If convicted, the defendant faces a maximum possible sentence of eighty years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $500,000," a press release from the Department of Justice and US Attorney's office said. One local news site reported Blumenthal faces only a maximum possible sentence of ten years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. But she's currently being held in jail without bail until her trial begins.

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Facebook Research has released technology to create 3D models of people from photographs, reports shirappu: The technology, called PIFuHD, takes photographs of people and reconstructs them in 3D. The tech works on deep neural networks with multi-level architecture that allows for high resolution and accuracy in 3D models even at low levels of memory. More is available in the detail-heavy research paper. Applications for this kind of automated image digitization include medical imaging and virtual reality, and the researchers have released a version of the model for users to try out themselves on Google Colab.

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I love fresh cherries.

Engineers at the University of California, Davis, have developed a new approach to 3D printing with potential applications in tissue engineering, soft robotics, and wearable technology — by repurposing the glass capillary microfluidic devices used in their lab to encapsulate one chemical inside droplets of another: The resulting structure looks like a Pac-Man maze, with little dots of PEGDA droplets surrounded by PDMS. Once the PEGDA diffuses out of the droplets, it chemically softens the PDMS, making the structure more flexible. "You can also encapsulate other chemicals in the droplets to make the overall matrix much softer or harder," said Jiandi Wan, assistant professor of chemical engineering at UC Davis. The team also showed that droplet-based 3D printing can be used to produce flexible porous objects, and constructs with encapsulated polymer particles and metal droplets. In addition, structure flexibility can be easily tuned by changing the droplet size and flow rate. This gives researchers a wide range of options to truly design their structure and vary flexibility to fit their needs in a way that's difficult with the conventional nozzle-based method. Though microfluidic-based 3D printing has been done before, Wan's group is the first to use this droplet-based multiphase emulsion approach. The team is already looking into potential applications and learning what other combinations of materials they can use to change the mechanical or chemical properties of 3D printed products. They think the work could have applications in bioprinting and wearable electronics, like smart fabrics. Long-time Slashdot reader mi also notes there's been recent interest in 3D-printing living tissue — and then shares an even more interesting recent paper on "biomaterial formulation and robotic methods" for "the biofabrication of 3D tissue-engineered scaffolds inside of a living patient." In other words, 3D-printing tissue directly into the body.

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Observation: The US, not just Trump, wants to be distracted from the terror of the virus. Fact: We're so crazy we actually create events to help it spread faster. Action required: Pay more attention to the WHO and less to the antics of the US government.

A bug in journalism is that it tries to put people in boxes. Your ideas only have value if you have credentials to back them up. This method makes reporters easily replaced by algorithms, and keeps us from hearing the most interesting even eclectic idea stimulating ideas. Of course no one in journalism will hear this because heh I lack the proper credentials.

Long-time Slashdot reader frootcakeuk quotes an article from Hot Hardware: Earlier this year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation hooked up with Igalia to start development on an open-sourced Vulkan graphics driver for the Raspberry Pi. However, Martin Thomas, an engineer at Nvidia, beat them to the punch. Thomas announced yesterday via his personal Twitter that his RPi-VK-Driver is ready for primetime. The talented engineer had been working on the Vulkan driver in his spare time for more than two years. Technically, Thomas' iteration isn't a Vulkan driver per se because it doesn't comply with the official standards established by The Khronos Group. Nonetheless, the resourceful developer produced a driver that adheres to the Vulkan parameters as much as possible, and as close as the hardware would permit it. There's just one limitation with the RPi-VK-Driver though. Unlike the official Vulkan driver that's still in the works, Thomas' version is only compatible with the Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU that's found inside the Raspberry Pi 1, 2, 3 and Zero devices.

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The "bespoke development" site Evrone.com (an IT outsourcing company) interviewed Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson (who is also co-founder and CTO of Basecamp -- and a racecar driver) shortly before he spoke at RubyRussia, Evrone's annual Moscow programming conference. And they asked him an interesting question. As a man who's seen lots of Ruby code, "what makes code good or shitty? Anything that is obvious for you at first glance?" David Heinemeier Hansson: If the code is poorly written, usually it smells before you even examine the logic. Indentation is off, styles are mixed, care is simply not shown. Beyond that, learning how to write great code, is a life long pursuit. As I said in my RailsConf 2014 keynote, we're not software engineers, we're software writers. "Writing" is a much more suitable metaphor for what we do most of the time than "engineering" is. Writing is about clarity and presenting information in a clear-to-follow manner so that anybody can understand it. There's no list of principles and practices that somebody can be taught and then they will automatically produce clear writing every time. If you want to be a good writer, it's not enough just to memorize the dictionary. Just knowing the words available to you, knowing the patterns of development is not going to make you a good developer. You have to develop an eye. You have to decide that the most important thing for your system is clarity. When you do decide that, you can start developing an eye. The only way to become a good programmer, where, by definition, I define good programmers as somebody who writes software with clarity, is to read a lot of software and write a lot of software. In 2016, David Heinemeier Hansson answered questions from Slashdot readers.

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My dad, probably around my age now, in Switzerland, having a snack of coffee and pie. My parents went hiking there every summer. They did a lot of traveling earlier in life, all over the world, but in the last couple of decades it was all about Switzerland.

Professor Leon Winer, in his happy place.

The WHO had something to say that we all must hear, but they didn't get much coverage. We were all too busy focusing on Trump's shenanigans, as always. There should be a daily briefing with Dr Fauci, broadcast on all channels, treated as news, I don't care if he has to quit the government to do it. The WHO message is this -- the virus is spinning up to a new level, and it's going to cost us hugely to get it to quiet back down. This has to be said clearly and repeatedly with authority. In America the only one who can do that is Fauci. Without Trump, obviously. Maybe Wolf Blitzer, who clearly has a rapport with Fauci should take a leave from CNN to be his partner in this.

This. This is how you do political advertising. You are watching history here folks. Pay attention.

An anonymous reader quotes CBS News: Researchers, armchair astronauts and even brides and grooms looking for an out-of-this-world wedding experience will be able to celebrate, collect data or simply enjoy the view from an altitude of 100,000 feet in a balloon-borne pressurized cabin, complete with a bar and a restroom, a space startup announced Thursday. "Spaceship Neptune," operated by a company called Space Perspective from leased facilities at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, will carry eight passengers at a time on six-hour flights [with a crew member]. The passenger cabin, lifted by a huge hydrogen-filled balloon, will climb at a sedate 12 miles per hour to an altitude of about 30 miles high. That will be followed by a slow descent to splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean where a recovery ship will be standing by to secure the cabin and crew. Test flights carrying scientific research payloads are expected to begin in 2021. The first flights carrying passengers are expected within the next three-and-a-half years or so, with piloted test flights before that. While the company initially will operate out of the Florida spaceport, the system could be launched from multiple sites around the world, with Hawaii and Alaska near-term possibilities. They're expecting to charge around $125,000 per passenger, according to the article — about half the price of higher sub-orbital flight on a Virgin Galactic rocket-powered spaceplane. Though Spaceship Neptune's customers will not experience weightlessness, their CEO is still promising "opportunities for civilian astronauts to experience this planet Earth from the edge of space, a privilege previously available to only a few." And they're also touting "really great" live air-to-ground communication — which they think would be great for corporate events.

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I can't get this song out of my head. "What's so strange when you know that you're a wizard at three? I knew that this was meant to be."

Before yesterday's rally in Tulsa, TikTok Teens and K-pop fans organized to spam the registration page with signups. So they had 800K signups, with room for only 19K fans. Only 4 million live in Oklahoma. So the numbers were fishy. Even so the Trump campaign hyped them. They seem to have believed them. They must've wanted to. Ethan Zuckerman says it was activism, it was, and it's surprising how well it worked.