The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will meet Wednesday with telecom and airline industry officials on a push to retrofit and ultimately replace some airplane radio altimeters that could face interference from C-Band 5G wireless service. Reuters reports: The altimeters give data on a plane's height above the ground and are crucial for bad-weather landings, but airline concerns about wireless interference from a planned 5G rollout led to disruptions at some U.S. airports earlier this year. The FAA wants to use the meeting to establish "an achievable timeframe to retrofit/replace radar altimeters in the U.S. fleet," according to a previously unreported letter from the FAA's top aviation safety official Chris Rocheleau reviewed by Reuters. It also asked aviation representatives "to offer options and commit to actions necessary to meet these objectives."

The planned three-and-a-half hour roundtable meeting will also include a discussion on prioritizing retrofits with antenna filters, which mitigate potential interference from 5G. Antenna filters are currently in production, officials said. A key question is how to determine which planes are most at risk of interference and should therefore get retrofitted first. The meeting will also look at what is set to happen after July 5 and outline "changes to U.S. national airspace operating environment as a result of future 5G C-band deployment in the coming months."

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report by Gizmodo, written by Isaac Schultz: The Dark Matter Radio project is attempting to detect hidden photons in a specific frequency range by methodically turning the dial, in what amounts to a patient, sweeping search of the wavelengths where such a particle could sound off. Later generations of the radio will hunt axions. [...] The current Dark Matter Radio experiment is the prototype, or Pathfinder, for larger projects down the line. It consists of a liter-volume cylinder made of superconducting niobium metal, around which is tightly wound niobium wire. It looks a bit like someone wound guitar string on a spool's vertical axis instead of its horizontal axis. That's the Pathfinder's inductor. If a hidden photon resonating at the frequency the Pathfinder was tuned to passed through it, the change in magnetic field would induce a voltage around the contraption's inductor. "The null hypothesis is that there shouldn't be any radio waves inside of that box unless, in this case, hidden photons, which are our particular flavor of dark matter," said Stephen Kuenstner, a physicist at Stanford University and a member of the DM Radio team. Hidden photons "can pass through the box and they have some probability of interacting with the circuit in the same way that a radio wave would," Kuenstner said.

To amplify any signal the Pathfinder picks up, there's a hexagonal shield of niobium plates sheathing the aforesaid components that acts as a capacitor. That amplified signal is then transported to a quantum sensor called a SQUID (a Superconducting QUantum Interference Device), a technology invented by the Ford Motor Company in the 1960s. The SQUID lives on the bottom of the radio and measures and records any signals picked up. The smaller the expected mass for the axion becomes, the more elusive the particle is, as its interactions with ordinary matter are proportional to its mass. So it's important that the next generation of DM Radio becomes more sensitive. The way the experiment is set up, "the frequency on the dial is the mass of the axion," [said Kent Irwin, a physicist at Stanford University and SLAC and the principal investigator of Dark Matter Radio]. Convenient! The mass of these particles doesn't even compare to the smallest things you might think of, like atoms or quarks. These particles would be somewhere between a trillionth and a millionth of an electronvolt, and an electronvolt is about a billionth of a proton's mass.

The helium Pathfinder uses is gaseous, and remains a relatively warm 4 kelvin (in other words, four degrees above absolute zero), but the next experiment -- Dark Matter Radio 50L -- will use liquified helium, cooled to less than one degree above absolute zero. All the better for hearing dark matter with. DM Radio 50L sits in the corner of a large room in the Hansen Experimental Physics Lab at Stanford. The room looks a little bit like the TV room in Willy Wonka's factory; it has high ceilings, lots of inscrutable equipment, and is glaringly white. Two 6-foot-tall dilution refrigerators on one side, abutting a deep closet, are the radio. The two machines are fed gaseous helium sitting in tanks in the next room, which they then cool down into liquid helium of a frigid 2 kelvin. Magnets inside gold-plated copper and aluminum sheathes will do the job of converting any detected axions into radio waves for physicists to interpret. "The particle physics community is -- the analogy is often said -- just like a battleship. It takes a while to turn and it has a lot of momentum," Irwin said. "So even though I think that there's a lot of reasons to believe that these radio-like dark matter signals are more attractive -- the axionic signals -- than [Weakly Interactinv Massive Particles (WIMPs)], there's still a lot of giant experiments searching for little things, which is good." The team behind the Dark Matter Radio is "currently working with the Department of Energy on a next-next-generation experiment that will look for axions in a cubic meter, hence its name of DM Radio-m3," adds Gizmodo. "In the more distant future, Irwin and his team have aspirations for a project called DM Radio-GUT, which would be closer to the scale of some of the largest physics experiments on the planet."

"All told, Irwin said, the favored area for axion mass could be searched in the next couple of decades using larger experiments -- though the team could simply find an axion before then, potentially ending the hunt for dark matter in its entirety. With enough listening, we might have an entirely new particle for the textbooks. Or maybe there'll be radio silence."

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science: Astronomers have detected a strange, repeating radio signal near the center of the Milky Way, and it's unlike any other energy signature ever studied. According to a new paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and posted on the preprint server arXiv, the energy source is extremely finicky, appearing bright in the radio spectrum for weeks at a time and then completely vanishing within a day. This behavior doesn't quite fit the profile of any known type of celestial body, the researchers wrote in their study, and thus may represent "a new class of objects being discovered through radio imaging."

The radio source -- known as ASKAP J173608.2321635 -- was detected with the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, situated in the remote Australian outback. In an ASKAP survey taken between April 2019 and August 2020, the strange signal appeared 13 times, never lasting in the sky for more than a few weeks, the researchers wrote. This radio source is highly variable, appearing and disappearing with no predictable schedule, and doesn't seem to appear in any other radio telescope data prior to the ASKAP survey.

When the researchers tried to match the energy source with observations from other telescopes -- including the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, as well as the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy in Chile, which can pick up near-infrared wavelengths -- the signal disappeared entirely. With no apparent emissions in any other part of the electromagnetic spectrum, ASKAP J173608.2-321635 is a radio ghost that seems to defy explanation. Prior surveys have detected low-mass stars that periodically flare up with radio energy, but those flaring stars typically have X-ray counterparts, the researchers wrote. That makes a stellar source unlikely here. Dead stars, like pulsars and magnetars (two types of ultradense, collapsed stars), are also unlikely explanations, the team wrote. The report goes on to say that the closest match is a mysterious class of object known as a galactic center radio transient (GCRT), a rapidly glowing radio source that brightens and decays near the Milky Way's center, usually over the course of a few hours. "So far, only three GCRTs have been confirmed, and all of them appear and disappear much more quickly than this new ASKAP object does," reports Live Science. "However, the few known GCRTs do shine with a similar brightness as the mysterious signal, and their radio flare-ups are never accompanied by X-rays."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: It's rare that apps come back from the dead, but it seems like that may be what's happening with Turntable.fm, a site that let users create their own radio stations and DJ sets with music they curated before it got shuttered in 2014. Even rarer, it seems like there are two versions involved in the revival: the original Turntable.fm site is back up and running (with the involvement of its original founder, Billy Chasen), but there's also Turntable.org, which will reportedly be launching in beta this April.

The two sites seem to be taking different directions: Turntable.org, the new version, mentions there will be a subscription fee, while the original seems to be largely unchanged from the one that shut down in 2014. While the original founder has confirmed he's involved with the .fm version, the .org version also has OGs working on it: the Our Team section mentions an original Turntable founding member as well as the artist who designed the original avatars in 2011.

The original app, and the current Turntable.fm, lets you create a virtual room, then select what music you want to play for anyone listening. At the moment, the song selection seems to be limited to what's available on YouTube, so you probably won't be able to sneakily slide in your mixtape. There appears to be a SoundCloud integration that's not working yet. Also, the whole site seems to be phasing in and out of existence, perhaps due to word of its return getting around. Assuming you can find your way in, the audience can chat about your great (or awful) song selections. You can also co-DJ with collaborators, if you feel like riffing off a friend, or co-worker.

A new quantum sensor can analyze the full spectrum of radio frequency and real-world signals, unleashing new potentials for soldier communications, spectrum awareness and electronic warfare. Phys.Org reports: Army researchers built the quantum sensor, which can sample the radio-frequency spectrum -- from zero frequency up to 20 GHz -- and detect AM and FM radio, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other communication signals. The Rydberg sensor uses laser beams to create highly-excited Rydberg atoms directly above a microwave circuit, to boost and hone in on the portion of the spectrum being measured. The Rydberg atoms are sensitive to the circuit's voltage, enabling the device to be used as a sensitive probe for the wide range of signals in the RF spectrum.

The Rydberg spectrum analyzer has the potential to surpass fundamental limitations of traditional electronics in sensitivity, bandwidth and frequency range. Because of this, the lab's Rydberg spectrum analyzer and other quantum sensors have the potential to unlock a new frontier of Army sensors for spectrum awareness, electronic warfare, sensing and communications -- part of the Army's modernization strategy. The peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Applied published the researchers' findings, Waveguide-coupled Rydberg spectrum analyzer from 0 to 20 GigaHerz, co-authored by Army researchers Drs. David Meyer, Paul Kunz, and Kevin Cox.

New submitter SirKveldulv shares a report from Nikkei Asia: Livestreaming platforms now must limit the amount of money a user can give hosts as a tip. Users must register their real names to buy the virtual gifts, in addition to the ban on teens giving such gifts. The [National Radio and Television Administration, China's media watchdog] also asked the platforms to strengthen training for employees who screen content and encouraged the companies to hire more censors, who also will need to register with regulators.

The media regulator will create a blacklist of hosts who frequently violate the rules, and ban them from hosting livestreaming programs on any platform. "The livestreaming platforms should prioritize social benefits and spread the positive energy," the notification said. The administration also asked the platforms to strengthen training for employees who screen content and encouraged the companies to hire more censors, who also will need to register with regulators. The media regulator will create a blacklist of hosts who frequently violate the rules, and ban them from hosting livestreaming programs on any platform. "The livestreaming platforms should prioritize social benefits and spread the positive energy," the notification said.

The giant, aging cables that support one of the world's largest single-dish radio telescopes are slowly unraveling in this U.S. territory, pushing an observatory renowned for its key role in astronomical discoveries to the brink of collapse. The Associated Press reports: The Arecibo Observatory, which is tethered above a sinkhole in Puerto Rico's lush mountain region, boasts a 1,000-foot-wide (305-meter-wide) dish featured in the Jodie Foster film "Contact" and the James Bond movie "GoldenEye." The dish and a dome suspended above it have been used to track asteroids headed toward Earth, conduct research that led to a Nobel Prize and helped scientists trying to determine if a planet is habitable. Last week, one of the telescope's main steel cables that was capable of sustaining 1.2 million pounds (544,000 kilograms) snapped under only 624,000 pounds (283,000 kilograms). That failure further mangled the reflector dish after an auxiliary cable broke in August, tearing a 100-foot hole and damaging the dome above it.

Officials said they were surprised because they had evaluated the structure in August and believed it could handle the shift in weight based on previous inspections. It's a blow for the telescope that more than 250 scientists around the world were using. The facility is also one of Puerto Rico's main tourist attractions, drawing some 90,000 visitors a year. Research has been suspended since August, including a project aiding scientists in their search for nearby galaxies. Some new cables are scheduled to arrive next month, but officials said funding for repairs has not been worked out with federal agencies. Scientists warn that time is running out. Only a handful of cables now support the 900-ton platform. The observatory estimates the damage at more than $12 million and is seeking money from the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency that owns the observatory. The report notes that the observatory is considered crucial for the study of pulsars, which are the remains of stars that can be used to detect gravitational waves. It's also used to search for natural hydrogen, which can reveal how certain cosmic structures are formed.

The first detection of a fast radio burst inside the Milky Way leads scientists back to a magnetar, partially solving a long-standing mystery. CNET reports: Sifting through a trove of radio telescope data in 2007, Duncan Lorimer, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University, spotted something unusual. Data obtained six years earlier showed a brief, energetic burst, lasting no more than 5 milliseconds. Others had seen the blip and looked past it, but Lorimer and his team calculated that it was an entirely new phenomenon: a signal emanating from somewhere far outside the Milky Way. The team had no idea what had caused it but they published their results in Science. The mysterious signal became known as a "fast radio burst," or FRB. In the 13 years since Lorimer's discovery, dozens of FRBs have been discovered outside of the Milky Way -- some repeating and others ephemeral, single chirps. Astrophysicists have been able to pinpoint their home galaxies, but they've struggled to identify the cosmic culprit, putting forth all sorts of theories, from exotic physics to alien civilizations.

On Wednesday, a trio of studies in the journal Nature describes the source of the first FRB discovered within the Milky Way, revealing the mechanism behind at least some of the highly energetic radio blasts. The newly described burst, dubbed FRB 200428, was discovered and located after it pinged radio antennas in the US and Canada on April 28, 2020. A hurried hunt followed, with teams of researchers around the globe focused on studying the FRB across the electromagnetic spectrum. It was quickly determined that FRB 200428 is the most energetic radio pulse ever detected in our home galaxy.

In the suite of new papers, astrophysicists outline their detective work and breakthrough observations from a handful of ground- and space-based telescopes. Linking together concordant observations, researchers pin FRB 200428 on one of the most unusual wonders of the cosmos: a magnetar, the hypermagnetic remains of a dead supergiant star. It's the first time astrophysicists have been able to finger a culprit in the intergalactic whodunit -- but this is just the beginning. "There really is a lot more to be learned going forward," says Amanda Weltman, an astrophysicist at the University of Cape Town and author of a Nature news article accompanying the discovery. "This is just the first exciting step."

A new large-scale survey of the sky looked into the dark forest of the cosmos, examining over 10 million stars, but failed to turn up any evidence of alien technologies. CNET reports: The study, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia on Monday, details a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a collection of 4096 antennas planted in the red soil of Western Australia that detects radio signals from space. "They are little spider-like antennas that sit on the ground," explains Chenoa Tremblay, co-author on the study and astrophysicist with CSIRO, an Australian government scientific research organization.

Tremblay and co-author Stephen Tingay, from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, used the MWA to listen out for "technosignatures," or evidence of alien technology, in a portion of the sky around the Vela constellation. Tremblay explains this region is scientifically interesting because a large number of stars have exploded and died, creating ideal conditions for new stars to form. The search for extraterrestrial life "piggy-backs" on other work studying this region to understand the life cycle of stars. [...] After listening to the Vela region for 17 hours, no unknown signals were detected. While the survey was able to capture over 10.3 million stellar sources and contained six known exoplanets (likely many more exist in the region), the team notes it was like trying to find something in an ocean, but only studying "a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool." And there's another big caveat. "Looking for technosignatures is assuming that the civilization have technology similar to our own," says Tremblay.

According to a new report from Pew Research, U.S. adults who get their news largely from social media platforms tend to fllow the news less closely and end up less informed on several key subjects when compared to those who use other sources, like TV, radio, and news publications. TechCrunch reports: The firm first asked people how they most commonly get their news. About one-in-five (18%) said they mostly use social media to stay current. That's close the percentages of those who say they use local TV (16%) or cable TV (16%) news, but fewer than those who say they go directly to a news website or app (25%). Another 13% said they use network TV and only 3% said they read a newspaper. To be clear, any study that asks users to self-report how they do something isn't going to be as useful as those that collect hard data on what the consumers actually do. In other words, people who think they're getting most of their news from TV may be, in reality, undercounting the time they spent on social media â" or vice versa.

That said, among this group of "primarily" social media news consumers, only 8% said they were following the key news story of the 2020 U.S. election "every closely," compared with 37% of cable TV viewers who said the same, or the 33% of print users who also said this. The social media group, on this topic, was closer to the local TV group (11%). On the topic of the coronavirus outbreak, only around a quarter (23%) of the primarily social media news consumers said they were following news of COVID-19 "very closely." All other groups again reported a higher percentage, including those who primarily used cable TV (50%), national network TV (50%), news websites and apps (44%), and local TV (32%) for news.

Related to this finding, the survey respondents were also asked 29 different fact-based questions about news topics from recent days, including those on Trump's impeachment, the COVID-19 outbreak, and others. Those who scored the lowest on these topics were the consumers who said they primarily used social media to get their news. Across 9 questions related to foundational political knowledge, only 17% of primarily social media news consumers scored "high political knowledge," meaning they got 8 to 9 of the questions right. 27% scored "middle political knowledge" (6-7 right) and 57% scored "low political knowledge" (5 or fewer right.) The only group that did worse were those who primarily relied on local TV. 45% of who got their news from news primarily via websites and apps, meanwhile, had "high political knowledge," compared with 42% for radio, 41% for print, 35% for cable TV, and 29% for network TV. The social media group of news consumers was also more exposed to fringe conspiracies, like the idea that the pandemic was intentionally planned.

Julianne Pepitone from IEEE Spectrum writes about the uncertain future of ham radio. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt: Will the amateur airwaves fall silent? Since the dawn of radio, amateur operators -- hams -- have transmitted on tenaciously guarded slices of spectrum. Electronic engineering has benefited tremendously from their activity, from the level of the individual engineer to the entire field. But the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, with its ability to easily connect billions of people, captured the attention of many potential hams. Now, with time taking its toll on the ranks of operators, new technologies offer opportunities to revitalize amateur radio, even if in a form that previous generations might not recognize. The number of U.S. amateur licenses has held at an anemic 1 percent annual growth for the past few years, with about 7,000 new licensees added every year for a total of 755,430 in 2018. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission doesn't track demographic data of operators, but anecdotally, white men in their 60s and 70s make up much of the population. As these baby boomers age out, the fear is that there are too few young people to sustain the hobby.

This question of how to attract younger operators also reveals deep divides in the ham community about the future of amateur radio. Like any large population, ham enthusiasts are no monolith; their opinions and outlooks on the decades to come vary widely. And emerging digital technologies are exacerbating these divides: Some hams see them as the future of amateur radio, while others grouse that they are eviscerating some of the best things about it. No matter where they land on these battle lines, however, everyone understands one fact. The world is changing; the amount of spectrum is not. And it will be hard to argue that spectrum reserved for amateur use and experimentation should not be sold off to commercial users if hardly any amateurs are taking advantage of it. One of the key debates in ham radio is its main function in the future: Is it a social hobby? A utility to deliver data traffic? And who gets to decide? "Those questions have no definitive or immediate answers, but they cut to the core of the future of ham radio," writes Pepitone. "Loring Kutchins, president of the Amateur Radio Safety Foundation, Inc. (ARSFi) -- which funds and guides the 'global radio email' system Winlink -- says the divide between hobbyists and utilitarians seems to come down to age."

"Younger people who have come along tend to see amateur radio as a service, as it's defined by FCC rules, which outline the purpose of amateur radio -- especially as it relates to emergency operations," Kutchins (W3QA) told Spectrum last year. Kutchins, 68, expanded on the theme in a recent interview: "The people of my era will be gone -- the people who got into it when it was magic to tune into Radio Moscow. But Grandpa's ham radio set isn't that big a deal compared to today's technology. That doesn't have to be sad. That's normal."

"Ham radio is really a social hobby, or it has been a very social hobby -- the rag-chewing has historically been the big part of it," says Martin F. Jue (K5FLU), founder of radio accessories maker MFJ Enterprises, in Starkville, Miss. "Here in Mississippi, you get to 5 or 6 o' clock and you have a big network going on and on -- some of them are half-drunk chattin' with you. It's a social group, and they won't even talk to you unless you're in the group."

Tilley, an amateur radio operator living in Canada, found a "zombie" military satellite that was supposed to shut down in 1972. NPR reports: Recently, Tilley got interested in a communications satellite he thought might still be alive -- or at least among the living dead. LES-5, built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory, was launched in 1967. Tilley was inspired by another amateur who in 2016 had found LES-1, an earlier satellite built by the same lab. What was intriguing to him about LES-5 was that if it was still working, it might be the oldest functioning satellite still in geostationary orbit. By scouring the Internet, he found a paper describing the radio frequency that LES-5, an experimental military UHF communications satellite, should be operating on -- if it was still alive. So he decided to have a look.

"This required the building of an antenna, erecting a new structure to support it. Pre-amps, filters, stuff that takes time to gather and put all together," he says. "When you have a family and a busy business, you don't really have a lot of time for that," he says. But then came the COVID-19 pandemic. British Columbia, where Tilley lives, was on lockdown. Like many of us, suddenly Tilley had time on his hands. He used it to look for LES-5, and on March 24, he hit the ham radio equivalent of pay dirt. While Tilley thinks it may be possible to send commands to the satellite, the MIT lab that built LES-5 didn't comment on the matter when NPR inquired.

Sonos launched its first audio service Tuesday, called Sonos Radio. It promises free and exclusive music programming across a few dozen stations. From a report: Many of these stations will be supported by advertising -- a new business for Sonos, which the company is entering at a time when the ad business is feeling the pressure of an evolving economic downturn. However, for Sonos, the radio service also represents a new opportunity to lean more heavily into product partnerships like its existing relationship with Ikea, and expand to new product categories, including automotive. As such, it's an interesting example for a consumer electronics company using services not only to generate revenue but also as a way to expand its core business.

Satellite radio giant SiriusXM announced today it's made its 300-plus channel streaming service available for free in North America starting today through May 15.

People staying at home due to the coronavirus pandemic appear to be listening to more radio rather than music apps, figures suggest. The BBC reports: Global, which owns Capital FM and talk station LBC, said online radio listening had risen by 15%. The BBC said streaming of its radio stations had risen 18% since last week. Meanwhile, data from two US analytics companies suggested use of music-streaming apps such as Spotify had dipped by about 8%.

According to trusted music industry monitor BuzzAngle, US music streaming between 13-19 March fell by 8.8% compared with the previous week. Rolling Stone magazine, which uses a different data provider, Alpha Data, said streams were down 7.8%. But not all services are equally affected. Classical music site Primephonic said streaming had gone up by about 20% since isolation measures had been introduced in Europe. "There are likely to be multiple causes," said BBC News music reporter Mark Savage. "Fewer people are commuting to work or going to the gym and shops that use Spotify for their in-store music are closing their doors. People who stream music in the office also seem to be turning off and watching Netflix instead and there's a big rise in radio listening - suggesting we're seeking companionship alongside our music."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: A test by Penumbra Brands to measure how much radiofrequency energy an iPhone 11 Pro gives off found that the phone emits more than twice the amount allowable by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The FCC measures exposure to RF energy as the amount of wireless power a person absorbs for each kilogram of their body. The agency calls this the specific absorption rate, or SAR. For a cellphone, the FCC's threshold of safe exposure is 1.6 watts per kilogram. Penumbra's test found that an iPhone 11 Pro emitted 3.8 W/kg.

Ryan McCaughey, Penumbra's chief technology officer, said the test was a follow up to an investigation conducted by the Chicago Tribune last year. The Tribune tested several generations of Apple, Samsung, and Motorola phones, and found that many exceeded the FCC's limit. Penumbra used RF Exposure Labs, an independent, accredited SAR testing lab for the tests (The Tribune also used the San Diego-based lab for its investigation). Penumbra was conducting the test, which also included testing an iPhone 7, to study its Alara phone cases, which the company says are designed to reduce RF exposure in a person. It's worth noting that when the FCC conducted a follow-up investigation they did not find evidence that any of the phones exceed SAR limits. "That said, while the Tribune and Penumbra both used off-the-shelf phones, the FCC largely tested phones supplied by the manufacturers, including Apple," adds IEEE Spectrum.

Joel Moskowitz, a researcher at UC Berkeley, says that could be because there's a systematic problem with RF Exposure Lab's testing methods, or Apple rigged the software in the provided test phones to ensure they didn't put out enough power to exceed the SAR limit. Either way, both McCaughey and Moskowitz agree that the FCC's RF exposure testing is woefully out of date, as the limits reflect what the FCC deemed safe 25 years ago.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: An amateur radio rig exposed to the internet and discovered by a security researcher was collecting real-time medical data and health information broadcast by hospitals and ambulances across U.K. towns and cities. The rig, operated out of a house in North London, was picking up radio waves from over the air and translating them into readable text. The hobbyist's computer display was filling up with messages about real-time medical emergencies from across the region. For some reason, the hobbyist had set up an internet-connected webcam pointed at the display. But because there was no password on the webcam, anyone who knew where to look could also see what was on the rig's computer display.

Daley Borda, a security researcher and bug bounty hunter, stumbled upon the exposed webcam. The live stream was grainy, and the quality of the images so poor that it was just possible to make out the text on the display. "You can see details of calls coming in -- their name, address, and injury," he told TechCrunch. TechCrunch verified his findings. Messages spilling across the screen appeared to direct nearby ambulances where to go following calls to the 999 emergency services. One message said a 98-year-old man had fallen at his home address. A few moments later, another message said a 49-year-old male was complaining of chest pains at a nearby residence. One after the other, messages were flooding in, describing accidents, incidents and medical emergencies, often including their home addresses. "The hobbyist was picking up and decoding pager communications from a nearby regional National Health Service trust," adds TechCrunch. These devices remain a fixture in UK hospitals and "allow anyone to send messages to one or many pagers at once by calling a dedicated phone number, often manned by an operator, which are then broadcast as radio waves over the pager network."

While the NHS still uses about 130,000 pagers, according to the UK government, it's not clear how many trusts are exposing medical information -- if at all.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: Motorola Solutions (not to be confused with Motorola Mobility, which makes the smartphones you know), the biggest global player in these LMR walkies, is releasing what appears to be the most advanced walkie-talkie ever. Called the APX Next, it's a chunky black brick with a thick antenna and a giant push-to-talk button on its side. Much like an iPhone, it also features a touchscreen on its front -- but don't be distracted by that. Its real innovation was born from 2,000 hours of interviews and testing with more than 50 emergency service agencies, including SWAT teams and detectives. It's a voice-recognition system that can operate in extremely loud environments, with artificial intelligence software that can look up 95 of the most common things a police officer or firefighter would call into dispatch -- like a driver's license, or license plate -- without any human operator on the other end of the line. But its ultimate promise is simply to free up the user's hands as much as possible, ensuring that someone is as safe and capable as possible during an emergency.

APX Next is a walkie-talkie and a cellphone combined. It has both the high-powered radio chip for land communications and a low-powered 4G/LTE chip for cell-tower data. These two chips can work at the same time, which is an engineering challenge, especially because the walkie-radio has 25 times the wattage of the 4G chip. The core buttons, including the large talk button, are all designed as you'd expect, to ensure they can be used without looking, and purely by muscle memory in stressful situations. Four separate microphones capture your voice, with programming designed specifically to cancel out exceptionally loud noises. But it isn't always listening for a wake word like the Echo or Google Home. You need to hit a button to cue the assistant. The company says it's using unnamed third parties to handle the natural language processing in the cloud. "What Motorola did was train the model specifically to handle things like ten-codes and even regionally specific dialects across the U.S," the report says.

"Once a question is sent to the cloud, the AI is able to scour a city or force's database for the same private information a dispatcher would be looking up." What's also neat is that the AI won't automatically read sensitive information out loud. Instead, the radio will beep when it has an answer, and the user can get to a private place, if they wish, before hitting a button to hear the results.

IEEE Spectrum describes how the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) partnered with Pivot Technology Services to help them relocate their massive radio-frequency emulation testbed, called "Colosseum." The testbed was built for the agency's Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) -- a three-year competition to demonstrate the validity of using AI to work together in order to use wireless spectrum more efficiently than operating on pre-allocated bands. Slashdot reader Wave723 shares an excerpt from the report: Colosseum was originally built and housed at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. That changed at the beginning of October, when the testbed was dismantled and later trucked to Los Angeles for the competition's finale, scheduled to begin at 3:30pm PDT today at MWC Los Angeles. [...] There may have been some molehills during the checks, but moving Colosseum definitely qualifies as a mountain. The testbed uses 3 Peta-Ops per second of computing power and 52 terabytes per second of data to emulate 65,000 channel operations between 256 wireless devices. It can draw up to 92 kilowatts of power and requires 200 gallons of water per minute to cycle through its cooling system to keep it from overheating.

Colosseum is housed within a space twice of the size of a cargo container -- in fact, its housing is literally built from two converted cargo containers put side by side. The halves arrived at the Los Angeles Convention Center during the set-up for MWC Los Angeles, and were hauled into the building and onto the convention floor by two 18-wheelers. We're going to move right past the crazy fact that DARPA and its hired logistics companies drove two semi-trucks into the Los Angeles Convention Center, because it gets better. To actually lower Colosseum's halves onto the ground, the next step involved something that both Tilghman and Gabel referred to as a "forklift ballet." As it turned out, the convention center didn't have a forklift strong enough to lift either half, so everyone improvised and used four smaller forklifts simultaneously by carefully arranging them around each half of Colosseum. It worked, but Gabel, in showing me a video of the forklift ballet, pointed out a moment where one of the forklift's rear wheels lifted off the ground as the machine and its operator grappled with Colosseum's weight...

Physicists at Stockholm University and the Max Planck Institute of Physics have proposed a novel design for an "axion radio" that employs cold plasmas (gases or liquids of charged particles) to "listen" for dark matter. Their paper has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Ars Technica reports: "Finding the axion is a bit like tuning a radio: you have to tune your antenna until you pick up the right frequency," said co-author Alexander Millar, a postdoc at Stockholm University. "Rather than music, experimentalists would be rewarded with 'hearing' the dark matter that the Earth is traveling through." [...] According to quantum mechanics, particles can exhibit wavelike behavior as well as particle characteristics. So an axion would behave more like a wave (or wave packet) than a particle, and the size of the wave packets is inversely proportional to their mass. That means these very light particles don't necessarily need to be tiny. The downside is that they interact even more weakly with regular matter than [weakly interacting massive particles], or WIMPS, so they cannot be produced in large colliders -- one current method for detecting WIMPs.

Physicists don't know what the axion's mass might be, so there's a broad parameter space in which to search, and no single instrument can cover all of it, according to co-author Matthew Lawson, also a postdoc at Stockholm University. That's why physicists have been developing all kinds of smaller experiments for detecting axions, from atomic clocks and resonating bars, to shining lasers at walls on the off-chance a bit of dark matter seeps through the other side. Yet most instruments to date are capable of detecting axions only within a very limited mass range. [...] Lawson et al. have come up with an innovative design for a tunable plasma-based haloscope. Their proposed instrument exploits the fact that axions inside a strong magnetic field will generate their own small electric field. This in turn drives oscillations in the plasma, amplifying the signal. [...] At the moment, Lawson et al.'s design is theoretical, but several experimental groups are actively working on building prototypes. "The fact that the experimental community has latched onto this idea so quickly is very exciting and promising for building a full-scale experiment," said Millar.