SpaceX has said anyone can hack into its Starlink satellite network and is willing to pay them up to $25,000 to find specific vulnerabilities. The announcement came after cybersecurity expert Lennert Wouters revealed that he successfully hacked a Starlink terminal using a $25 chip. Wouters said his attack could render Starlink terminals unusable and allow arbitrary code to run on them.

SpaceX, in turn, congratulated Wouters on his successful hacking attempt in a six-page document entitled “Starlink Welcomes Security Researchers (Find Bugs)”. “We find the attack technically impressive, and this is the first such attack that we are aware of on our system,” the document says. However, the hack carried out by Wouters using a homemade chip should not worry Starlink users, as it will not have a direct impact on the satellites, SpaceX added.

In-house engineers are always trying to hack Starlink to improve service and make the network more secure, according to a SpaceX document. Security researchers can conduct their own testing, and if they discover a vulnerability and report it, they can receive a monetary reward, the company notes. The award ranges from $100 to $25,000. But SpaceX has conditions: bug hunting must not disrupt user services, physical attacks on large-scale infrastructure are prohibited, as well as email spoofing (forgery of the sender’s address in emails).

Member of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies Joenia Wapichana proposed to tokenize gold and use blockchain to prevent illegal mining and sale of this precious metal.

According to Vapichana, the country should be able to account for gold mining activities on its territory. The bill introduces new legislation aimed at transactions with precious metals and their transportation.

The bill will also help fight illegal mining activities in the country.

The legislator noted that about half of the gold in the country is mined illegally. She added that illegal mining activities have worsened the environmental impact of the mining industry.

These operations are accompanied by mercury pollution, violence and deforestation, which has been frequently reported in the national and international press, as well as civil society organizations that fight to protect the forest and guarantee the rights of indigenous peoples.

Therefore, Vapishana proposed to create a single system based on the blockchain, in which information about the mined gold will be entered, and through which its sale will be carried out. To do this, it is necessary to make the necessary amendments to the legislation of the country, the deputy added.

The idea of ​​tokenizing natural resources also came up this summer with the government of the Central African Republic (CAR). It believes that this will attract funds from foreign investors and accelerate the adoption of crypto assets in the country. In 2020, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire suggested that within a few years, asset tokenization will gain popularity as it is an effective way to increase liquidity.

European and American physicists have developed a plasma facility that allows extracting oxygen from carbon dioxide molecules present in the Martian atmosphere. This was reported by the press service of the American Physical Institute.

“We assumed that the collision of high-energy electrons with CO molecules₂ will lead to the decomposition of this substance or to the release of heat. This energy can also be used to break down carbon dioxide. Together with colleagues from France and the Netherlands, we were able to experimentally confirm these hypotheses.”, – said associate professor of the University of Lisbon (Portugal) Vasco Guerra.

In the past six years, at the suggestion of Elon Musk, scientists have begun to seriously think about how humanity can begin the process of colonizing Mars and other potentially habitable planets. To do this, as the researchers now suggest, two problems need to be solved: to learn how to produce energy, as well as oxygen, water and food, using local resources.

As Guerra and his colleagues note, oxygen production will be one of the most important and energy-intensive tasks that the first colonists on Mars will face. To solve it, scientists are developing systems that can extract oxygen from the Martian air and soil. One such facility, MOXIE, was installed aboard the Perseverance rover and successfully tested on Mars in April last year.

MOXIE absorbs carbon dioxide, heats it up to 800 degrees Celsius and passes it through a special ceramic material that breaks down CO₂ to oxygen (O₂) and carbon monoxide (CO). European physicists and their American colleagues have developed an alternative approach that markedly outperforms the MOXIE system in terms of compactness and oxygen production efficiency.

The installation created by scientists relies in its work on the fact that CO molecules₂ become much less stable if they are placed inside a rarefied plasma, the electrons inside of which have a much higher energy than ions and neutral molecules. In theory, this allows the splitting of CO₂ to carbon monoxide and oxygen if CO molecules₂ will often encounter electron beams with well-defined properties.

Guided by this idea, Guerra and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments during which they studied the interactions of oxygen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide inside an inhomogeneous plasma. These experiments helped scientists to choose such operating parameters, in which oxygen almost did not combine with carbon monoxide and did not form new CO molecules.₂.

As the researchers note, the production of oxygen using plasma does not require heating the Martian air to temperatures exceeding 30-40 degrees Celsius, as well as high pressure. In the future, this will significantly reduce the cost of energy and resources for the production of oxygen on Mars, the physicists summed up.