The organizers of the DEF CON cyber-security conference have announced today that they are putting this year's China edition "on hold" due to the ongoing Wuhan coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak. From a report: "China has announced a six-month hold on events like ours as part of the effort to combat the coronavirus outbreak," the DEF CON team said in a forum post today. DEF CON is one of the Top 3 most prestigious cyber-security conferences today. The conference is held each year in Las Vegas, in the month of August. The Chinese edition of the DEF CON conference, which would have reached its second edition this year, was set to take place in Beijing between April 17 and April 19. Organizers said they are currently putting the DEF CON China 2.0 conference on hold, but have not officially canceled the event.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: An interdisciplinary team from the University of Basel in Switzerland has succeeded in creating a direct path for artificial nanocontainers to enter into the nucleus of living cells. To this end, they produced biocompatible polymer vesicles that can pass through the pores that decorate the membrane of the cell nucleus. In this way, it might be possible to transport drugs directly into the cell's control center. In order to combat diseases, different therapies strive to intervene in pathological processes that occur in the cell nucleus. Chemotherapies, for example, target biochemical reactions that are involved in the proliferation of cancer cells, while the objective of gene therapies is to insert a desired gene into the nucleus. Therefore, a challenge in the field of nanomedicine is to develop a reliable method of introducing active substances specifically into the cell nucleus. Researchers at the University of Basel have now developed tiny nanocontainers that do just that in living cells. The findings have been published in the journal PNAS.

schwit1 shares a report from the Smithsonian: Capable of following fishing boats into remote regions out of reach of monitoring machines like ships, aircraft and even certain satellites, these feathered crimefighters could offer a convenient and cost-effective way to keep tabs on foul play at sea -- and may even help gather crucial conservation data along the way. [...] On top of their stamina and moxie, albatrosses also have a certain fondness for fish-toting vessels, says study author Samantha Patrick, a marine biologist at the University of Liverpool. To the birds, the fishing gear attached to these boats is basically a smorgasbord of snacks -- and albatrosses can spot the ships from almost 20 miles away.

To test the birds' patrolling potential, the researchers stomped into the marshy nesting grounds of wandering albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) and Amsterdam albatrosses (Diomedea amsterdamensis) roosting on Crozet, Kerguelen and Amsterdam, three remote island locales in the southern Indian Ocean. After selecting 169 individuals of different ages, the team taped or glued transceivers, each weighing just two ounces, to the birds' backs and bid them adieu. Over the course of six months, the team's army of albatrosses surveyed over 20 million square miles of sea. Whenever the birds came within three or so miles of a boat, their trackers logged its coordinates, then beamed them via satellite to an online database that officials could access and cross-check with automatic identification system (AIS) data. Of the 353 fishing vessels detected, a whopping 28 percent had their AIS switched off. The number of covert ships was especially high in international waters, where about 37 percent of vessels operated AIS-free. [...] Because the birds and their transceivers detected only radar, no identifying information was logged. The task of verifying a boat's legal status still falls to officials, who must then decide whether to take action, Patrick explains. But in mapping potential hotspots of illegal fishing, the birds set off a chain reaction that could help bring perpetrators to justice. The results of the tracking method were published in the journal PNAS.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: A team of physicists has discovered an electrical detection method for terahertz electromagnetic waves, which are extremely difficult to detect. The discovery could help miniaturize the detection equipment on microchips and enhance sensitivity. The finding, reported today in Nature, is based on a magnetic resonance phenomenon in anti-ferromagnetic materials. Such materials, also called antiferromagnets, offer unique advantages for ultrafast and spin-based nanoscale device applications.

The researchers, led by physicist Jing Shi of the University of California, Riverside, generated a spin current, an important physical quantity in spintronics, in an antiferromagnet and were able to detect it electrically. To accomplish this feat, they used terahertz radiation to pump up magnetic resonance in chromia to facilitate its detection. [...] In order to generate such magnetic resonance, the team of physicists from UC Riverside and UC Santa Barbara worked with 0.24 terahertz of radiation produced at the Institute for Terahertz Science and Technology's Terahertz Facilities at the Santa Barbara campus. This closely matched the precession frequency of electrons in chromia. The magnetic resonance that followed resulted in the generation of a spin current that the researchers converted into a DC voltage. "We were able to demonstrate that antiferromagnetic resonance can produce an electrical voltage, a spintronic effect that has never been experimentally done before," said Shi, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

'Podfasters' listen to their favorite pods at 1.5x, even 2x speed. But how fast is too fast? From a report: Bumping the speed up to 1.5x was initially jarring. People were talking so quickly that I had to stop what I was doing and focus on the audio to keep it from falling into background chatter. After about 20 minutes of this intentional listening, however, it felt like my brain had adjusted. What at first felt rushed and slightly wrong, now felt natural. Once I found that I could go back to doing the things I normally do when I listen to podcasts -- brush my teeth, do the dishes, fold the laundry -- I bumped up the speed another notch to the 2x barrier. Like the previous jump in speed, the first 15 to 20 minutes required an additional level of focus to get my brain to match the cadence of the conversation. But once I was there I felt like I didn't have to strain to understand what was being said -- my brain just "learned" how to listen to this accelerated pace. In our discussion of breaking 2x, Uri Hasson, director of Princeton's Hasson Lab, brought up one population that handles sped-up speech much better than the rest of us: the visually impaired. A 2018 University of Washington study attempted to quantify human listening rates by measuring the intelligibility of audio from a text-to-speech generator played at increasingly faster speeds. Researchers found that the average sighted person could comprehend around 300 words per minute, or about double the average talking speed of an American English speaker. Visually impaired subjects, however, vastly outperformed sighted subjects at speeds past 2x, demonstrating comprehension at rates even approaching 3x.

The researchers hypothesized that this difference between sighted and visually impaired listening rates was attributed to one group being more familiar with synthesized text-to-speech voices. At 2x, the experience of listening to audio began to change: Though I could understand the words, they seemed to have less emotional resonance. At these high speeds, my brain seemed to shift away from assessing people's feelings towards baseline comprehension. At the end of each sentence, I'd feel a little twinge of joy, not because of anything happening in the podcast, but just because I had understood the words. Hasson points out that single word comprehension is really only one dimension of comprehension. Our brains do not work like computers. We can recognize words very quickly, but to integrate them into a sentence, a sentence into a paragraph, and a paragraph into a larger narrative takes time. Feeling competent in my base-level comprehension at 2x, I crossed the threshold into 3x. It took every ounce of concentration to just register what was being said. After 20 minutes, my brain couldn't settle into the rhythm of the conversation. I sat there for an hour, with my eyes closed, hoping that my brain would eventually "click" like it did before, but it refused.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: NASA will launch a new rover to Mars this July — and 28,000 American schoolchildren wrote essays with suggestions for what NASA should name it.

NASA has now selected the top nine finalists, which they'll let the public vote on through Monday on a special web page where they're also displaying the schoolchildren's essays. "Scientists are tenacious," wrote one student who suggested the name Tenacity. "It is what keeps them thinking and experimenting... When scientists make mistakes they see what they did wrong and then try again.

"If they didn't have tenacity, Mars rovers wouldn't be a thing."
The new rover will also be carrying the names of 10,932,295 earthlings, etched onto a microchip.

Bloomberg points out that because Mars and Earth are unusually close in July and August -- a mere 39 million miles -- another rover will also be launched by the international ExoMars programme (led by the European Space Agency and the Russian Roscosmos State Corporation), while the United Arab Emirates will also try sending an orbiter to Mars, and China will deploy "an orbiter to circle the planet and a rover to land on it."

"How does a 67-year-old hack with three minor children recover from going blind, losing his home and business in a horrible fire (like 2,000 others, we are still fighting with insurance companies), while appeasing an angry crowd of Kickstarter supporters armed with pitchforks and shovels?"

That crowd still wants long-time tech pundit Robert X. Cringely to deliver on his Kickstarter-funded project to create custom Minecraft servers. So in a new blog post this week, Cringely writes that "I went looking for venture money to recapitalize MineServer and I simultaneously started a satellite launch company to fund my eventual retirement. I am not making this up..."

He's now found a Beverly Hills patron who wants to be a co-investor in the Minecraft servers, but "I will have to earn the matching money on my own, which is what I have been trying to do with my other startup, Eldorado Space." Eldorado will later this year begin launching into low earth orbit CubeSats up to 12 kilograms in weight. Doing a space startup may seem like the stupidest, highest-risk way to go about restarting a career, but I thought it would be fun and it has been. Fortunately, we found a visionary billionaire to be our seed investor. We will shortly close our Series A round with most of that money already committed...

[F]or Eldorado, we (which means my co-founder Tomas Svitek -- a real rocket scientist who used to report directly to Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin -- seven engineers and me) pledged to invent nothing and to avoid liquid fuels if possible. We took 50-year-old ammonium perchlorate composite propellant (the same solid fuel used in the Space Shuttle's strap-on boosters) and improved it using modern materials, processes, and some common sense. NO 3D printing! The result is a cheaper rocket that can sit on the shelf for years then be launched as-needed within hours...

[W]e've offered to launch on FOUR hours notice and then launch again every TWO hours after that until they tell us to stop. So if Bond villain Ernst Blofeld, for example, figured out a way to take down the GPS system, we could replace the whole constellation in less than a day, then do it all over again as often as needed. That would probably deter Dr. Evil from even trying his trick in the first place.... Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit drops its rocket horizontally from a Boeing 747 flying at 35,000 feet going Mach 0.7. We "toss" our rocket while flying in a 45-degree climb at 78,000 feet going Mach 2.2, which is much more exciting. You can see the curvature of the Earth. Launching higher, faster, and at the proper angle lets us use a smaller cheaper rocket on a smaller cheaper aircraft for a lower launch price. Virgin charges $12 million per launch while we charge $1 million for up to 12U into any orbit....

"But how do you protect your business if you aren't inventing anything? Where is your intellectual property? Where is your defensive moat?" There's actually plenty of clever IP inside Eldorado, but what mainly keeps another startup from just copying our work is the required fleet of Mach 2.2+ launch aircraft. We bought all of them, you see... all of them on the planet.

The director of astrobiology at Columbia University saw something this week that he just had to respond to: Elon Musk "talking about sending 1 million people to Mars by 2050, using no less than three Starship launches per day (with a stash of 1,000 of these massive spacecraft on call)."

A reader shared this article from Scientific American: The martian radiation environment is a problem for human explorers that cannot be overstated... For reasons unclear to me, this tends to get pushed aside compared to other questions to do with Mars's atmosphere (akin to sitting 30km [18.6 miles] above Earth with no oxygen), temperatures, natural resources (water), nasty surface chemistry (perchlorates), and lower surface gravitational acceleration (1/3rd that on Earth). But we actually have rather good data on the radiation situation on Mars (and in transit to Mars) from the Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) that has been riding along with the Curiosity rover since its launch from Earth.

The bottom line is that the extremely thin atmosphere on Mars, and the absence of a strong global magnetic field, result in a complex and potent particle radiation environment. There are lower energy solar wind particles (like protons and helium nuclei) and much higher energy cosmic ray particles crashing into Mars all the time. The cosmic rays, for example, also generate substantial secondary radiation -- crunching into martian regolith to a depth of several meters before hitting an atomic nucleus in the soil and producing gamma-rays and neutron radation... [I]f we consider just the dose on Mars, the rate of exposure averaged over one Earth year is just over 20 times that of the maximum allowed for a Department of Energy radiation worker in the US (based off of annual exposure)....

[Y]ou'd need to put a few meters of regolith above you, or live in some deep caves and lava tubes to dodge the worst of the radiation. And then there are risks not to do with cancer that we're only just beginning to learn about. Specifically, there is evidence that neurological function is particularly sensitive to radiation exposure, and there is the question of our essential microbiome and how it copes with long-term, persistent radiation damage. Finally, as Hassler et al. discuss, the "flavor" (for want of a better word) of the radiation environment on Mars is simply unlike that on Earth, not just measured by extremes but by its make up, comprising different components than on Earth's surface.

To put all of this another way: in the worst case scenario (which may or may not be a realistic extrapolation) there's a chance you'd end up dead or stupid on Mars. Or both.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity "lost its orientation...partway through its last set of activities," reported a planetary geologist on the rover's team Monday.

Curiosity had lost track of its position in space and the position of its various parts like its robotic arm. "Thus, Curiosity stopped moving, freezing in place until its knowledge of its orientation can be recovered. Curiosity kept sending us information, so we know what happened and can develop a recovery plan...."

Space.com now shares the rest of the story:
"We learned this morning that plan was successful and Curiosity was ready for science once more!" mission team member Scott Guzewich, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, wrote in another update on Tuesday. This latest recovery shouldn't come as a shock; Curiosity has overcome numerous setbacks since landing inside Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater in August 2012. The rover has had issues with its memory and its wheels, for example, but has always bounced back...

Curiosity is now climbing the foothills of Mount Sharp, the 3.4-mile-high (5.5 km) mountain that rises from Gale Crater's center. The rover is reading the rocks for clues about Mars' long-ago climate transition, which turned the Red Planet from a relatively warm and wet place to the cold desert world it is today.
CNET notes that Curiosity is currently NASA's only working rover on Mars.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The first person diagnosed with the Wuhan coronavirus in the United States is being treated by a few medical workers and a robot. The robot, equipped with a stethoscope, is helping doctors take the man's vitals and communicate with him through a large screen, said Dr. George Diaz, chief of the infectious disease division at the Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington. "The nursing staff in the room move the robot around so we can see the patient in the screen, talk to him," Diaz said, adding the use of the robot minimizes exposure of medical staff to the infected man. It's unclear when the patient will be released because the CDC, which is set to provide the discharge details, has recommended additional testing. "They're looking for ongoing presence of the virus," Diaz told CNN on Thursday. "They're looking to see when the patient is no longer contagious."

Motoko Kakubayashi, from the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, writes via Phys.org: Physicists have been looking for laws that explain both the microscopic world of elementary particles and the macroscopic world of the universe and the Big Bang at its beginning, expecting that such fundamental laws should have symmetry in all circumstances. However, last year, two physicists found a theoretical proof that, at the most fundamental level, nature does not respect symmetry. There are four fundamental forces in the physical world: electromagnetism, strong force, weak force, and gravity. Gravity is the only force still unexplainable at the quantum level. Its effects on big objects, such as planets or stars, are relatively easy to see, but things get complicated when one tries to understand gravity in the small world of elementary particles.

To try to understand gravity on the quantum level, Hirosi Ooguri, the director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Tokyo, and Daniel Harlow, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, started with the holographic principle. This principle explains three-dimensional phenomena influenced by gravity on a two-dimensional flat space that is not influenced by gravity. This is not a real representation of our universe, but it is close enough to help researchers study its basic aspects. The pair then showed how quantum error correcting codes, which explain how three-dimensional gravitational phenomena pop out from two dimensions, like holograms, are not compatible with any symmetry; meaning such symmetry cannot be possible in quantum gravity.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Trump administration has for several years been working to weaken federal vehicle fuel-efficiency standards. To justify these changes, regulatory agencies argued that more stringent standards would both cost consumers more and reduce road safety. A draft version of the new final rule, however, seems to directly contradict those lines of reasoning. The draft of the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles rule has not been released publicly, but Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.) has seen it. In a letter (PDF) to the White House, Carper says not only is the rule "replete with numerous questionable legal, procedural, and technical assertions," as well as "apparent typographical and other errors," but it also completely fails to provide the safety or economic benefits initially claimed.

"Remarkably, the costs of the Trump administration's draft final rule exceed its benefits to Americans" relative to the current standards. The senator writes: "While the draft final rule finds that the per vehicle purchase price would be reduced relative to the Obama rules by $977 (EPA greenhouse gas standards)/$1,083 (DOT's fuel economy standards), the draft final rule also projects that the increased gasoline consumers would have to use to operate the less fuel-efficient vehicles would ad $1,461 (EPA greenhouse gas standards)/$1,423 (DOT fuel economy standards) to these costs. Adding hundreds of dollars to the cost of each vehicle would seem to be the opposite of the more "affordable" vehicles the SAFE rule promised." Further, Carper notes, the estimate of lives potentially saved over a nearly 50-year time period by upgrading to new cars does not take into account the lives potentially lost to illness and disease attributable to increased pollution from less efficient cars. And of course, Carper notes, lower fuel-economy standards that result in consumers buying and using more gas, means burning more fossil fuels at a time when we should be doing the opposite. "My office's review of the draft final rule indicates that it utterly fails to provide any demonstrable safety, environmental, or economic benefit to consumers or the country," Carper concludes. "It should be abandoned. At a minimum, I seek your commitment that you will not allow the finalization of this extreme and unlawful environmental rollback in any form that even remotely resembles" the current draft.

An anonymous reader shares a report: People are panicking. When a new disease is discovered, it's undeniably hard to identify and inform the public about it quickly. Yet China is making the problem harder to solve, even though it should have learned from the SARS outbreak in 2003, when the government admitted to underreporting cases in the initial stages. Nearly 800 people died in that epidemic, which saw desperate people emptying shops for Chinese herbal medicines and vinegar that would turn out to be ineffective. That frenzy was driven by the lack of accurate information and rumors because of a vacuum in top-down communication. The idea of wei wen, or maintaining stability in China's political system made "conceal as many as possible and keep it at the local level" a natural immediate response to a crisis like this.

That approach to information might work on other kinds of issues, but not when it comes to a potential epidemic. Trying to control information in that case becomes a kind of shackle in the face of something that can progress and change swiftly beyond one's control. Of course, there is one thing that's different than 17 years ago: WeChat. A tool connecting more than a billion users in China should be one the government can use to help keep the public up-to-date, and to debunk false information. Yet it too has become a hotbed for both rumors and information suppression amid China's broader regime of online censorship honed over the past decade. Already, a focus of social media discussion about the current virus crisis has been on how hard it's been to get correct information, and whether officials were slow to respond in the early stages, at least in Wuhan. While some international public health experts have commended China's information sharing as superior to 2003 in the face of a quickly evolving situation, others have expressed doubt that the country is being as transparent as it should be.

Longtime Slashdot reader vm writes: You don't have to wait until next Halloween to get creeped out. Using 3D printing, medical scanners, and an electronic larynx, researchers have recreated the voice of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy. The tongue has deteriorated over three millennia and all they have so far is a vowel sound but it's a pretty clever way to raise the dead with science. "The researchers then synthesized Nesyamun's voice by 3D printing a model of his airway and connecting it to an electronic larynx, an artificial voice box that provides a noise source," reports Science Magazine. "Based on writings on Nesyamun's coffin and the objects he was buried with, researchers know that he was an Egyptian priest and scribe who likely sang and spoke to the gods as part of his ritual duties. His coffin inscriptions include a wish to 'see and address the gods as he had in his working life.'"

The findings have been reported in the journal Scientific Reports.

pgmrdlm shares a report from ABC News: The results are finally in for the first chocolate chip cookie bake-off in space. While looking more or less normal, the best cookies required two hours of baking time last month up at the International Space Station. It takes far less time on Earth, under 20 minutes. And how do they taste? No one knows. Still sealed in individual baking pouches and packed in their spaceflight container, the cookies remain frozen in a Houston-area lab after splashing down two weeks ago in a SpaceX capsule. They were the first food baked in space from raw ingredients.

Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano was the master baker in December, radioing down a description as he baked them one by one in the prototype Zero G Oven. The first cookie -- in the oven for 25 minutes at 300 degrees Fahrenheit (149 degrees Celsius) -- ended up seriously under-baked. He more than doubled the baking time for the next two, and the results were still so-so. The fourth cookie stayed in the oven for two hours, and finally success. Parmitano cranked the oven up to its maximum 325 degrees F (163 degrees C) for the fifth cookie and baked it for 130 minutes. He reported more success. As for aroma, the astronauts could smell the cookies when they removed them from the oven, except for the first.

UPDATE (1/25/2018): NASA has successfully unfrozen Curiosity, which will now live to rove another day.

But here's the original report shared by a reader detailing what the concerns were: NASA reports that Curiosity has suffered a system failure that left the robot unaware of its position and attitude on the red planet. Until it recovers, Curiosity is frozen in place. Mars is far enough away that we can't directly control Curiosity in real-time -- the rover gets batches of commands and then carries them out. That means it needs to have precise awareness of the state of all its joints, as well as environmental details like the location of nearby obstacles and the slope of the ground. This vital information ensures the rover doesn't bump anything with its arm or clip large rocks as it rolls along.

Curiosity stores all this attitude data in memory, but something went wrong during operations several days ago. As the rover was carrying out its orders, it suddenly lost track of its orientation. The attitude data didn't add up, so Curiosity froze in place to avoid damaging itself. While the rover is physically stuck in place, it's still in communication with the team here on Earth. Since everything else is working on the rover, NASA was able to develop a set of instructions that should get the rover moving again. When transmitted, the data will inform Curiosity of its attitude and confirm its current state. This should allow the rover to recover and keep performing its safety checks. However, NASA also hopes to gather data on what caused the issue in the first place. The hope is they can avoid another freeze-up in the future.

Security researchers from CyberMDX, a cyber-security company specialized in healthcare security, have disclosed today technical details about six vulnerabilities they are collectively referring to as MDhex. From a report: The vulnerabilities impact seven GE Healthcare devices meant for patient vital signs monitoring. These are devices installed near patient beds, meant to collect data from sick patients, and send it back to a telemetry server, monitored by clinical staff.

India's largest and the world's highest gamma-ray telescope is set to go live later this year, aiming to provide a new window into distant stars and galaxies in the universe. From a report: The Major Atmospheric Cherenkov Experiment Telescope (MACE) in Hanle, Ladakh, is placed at an altitude of 4,300 metres above sea level. It is the world's second-largest, ground-based gamma-ray telescope with a 21-metre-diameter dish. The largest telescope of the same class is the 28-metre-diameter telescope, which is part of the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) in Namibia. "The installation of the telescope is complete and trial runs are being carried out. It will go live later this year. The first science results from this project will come in a year or two," Nilay Bhatt, a researcher at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), told ThePrint. The project is a collaboration of scientists from BARC, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, along with the Electronics Corporation of India Limited.

Memphis Meats, a Berkeley, Calif.-based startup, says it's one step closer to bringing cell-based meat to consumers' mouths. From a report: The company plans to build a pilot production facility with funds raised from high-profile investors including Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Kimbal Musk, as well as two giant players in the animal protein and feed space, Cargill and Tyson Foods. The company says its latest funding round has brought in $161 million in new investment. "People thought this was all science fiction" when the company was founded back in 2015, Uma Valeti, the co-founder and CEO of Memphis Meats, told NPR in an interview at the company's headquarters. "Everything that we've done at Memphis Meats [has] started to show that this can be done," Valeti said. "This is real."

Interest in cell-based meat production and other meat alternatives has increased amid growing awareness of the environmental impact of traditional livestock agriculture. Valeti and his team walked us through the process of producing cell-based meat. It starts with the selection of specific types of animal cells that can grow to become meat. Next, the cells are fed and put in a "cultivator" -- similar to a fermenting tank â" where they can grow and form muscle and connective tissue. The process is analogous to the way breweries grow yeast cells to produce beer. Only here, they're growing animal cells.

DirecTV is racing to move its Spaceway-1 satellite out of the geostationary arc after the 15-year-old satellite suffered a crippling battery malfunction that the company fears could cause it to explode. From a report: DirecTV told the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that it does not have time to deplete the remaining fuel on Spaceway-1 before disposing of it by boosting it 300 kilometers above the geostationary arc, a region home to most of the world's large communications satellites. Spaceway-1 is a Boeing-built High Power 702 model satellite that was designed to last 12 years. Launched in 2005 on a Sea Launch Zenit 3SL rocket, the 6,080-kilogram satellite originally provided high-definition television direct broadcasting services from its orbital slot at 102.8 degrees west longitude. More recently, Spaceway-1 was being used to backup Ka-band capacity over Alaska. In December, an unexplained anomaly caused "significant and irreversible thermal damage" to Spaceway-1's batteries, DirecTV said in a filing dated Jan. 19. Boeing, the filing says, concluded that the batteries are at high risk of bursting if recharged, since the damaged cells can't be isolated.