Science and Technology (old posts, page 222)

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Whitehall’s ambition to cut costs using AI is fraught with risk

No 10 must decide whether to ‘build or buy’ its AI technology as ministers increasingly lean on it to tackle crises

A Dragons’ Den-style event this week, where tech companies will have 20 minutes to pitch ideas for increasing automation in the British justice system, is one of numerous examples of how the cash-strapped Labour government hopes artificial intelligence and data science can save money and improve public services.

Amid warnings from critics that Downing Street has been “drinking the Kool-Aid” on AI, the Department of Health and Social Care this week announced an AI early warning system to detect dangerous maternity services after a series of scandals, and Wes Streeting, the health secretary, said he wants one in eight operations to be conducted by a robot within a decade.

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What does it take to make a nuclear weapon? – podcast

In an interview last weekend, Iran’s ambassador to the UN said his country’s nuclear enrichment ‘will never stop’ because it is permitted for ‘peaceful energy’ purposes. It is the latest development in an escalation of tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme, which erupted when Israel targeted the country’s nuclear facilities in June. To understand why enrichment is so important, Madeleine Finlay talks to Robin Grimes, professor of materials physics at Imperial College London. He explains what goes into creating a nuclear weapon, and why getting to the stage of weaponisation is so difficult

Iran’s nuclear enrichment ‘will never stop’, nation’s UN ambassador says

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Enhanced monitoring of Amazon EKS with Elastic add-on capabilities

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) makes running Kubernetes on AWS simple and scalable. But as your workloads grow, so does the need for robust monitoring and observability. Enter Elastic Agent, a powerful, unified way to collect logs, metrics, and security data from your EKS clusters, all managed through Elastic Fleet. In this blog, we’ll walk through how to set up Elastic Agent on EKS, highlight key considerations, and share some tips for getting the most out of your monitoring stack.

https://static-www.elastic.co/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt6bb8b4c3a1618135/68641ade02c701299db94eb2/Elastic-Agent-EKS-add-on.png,Elastic-Agent-EKS-add-on.png

Once the Elastic Agent is deployed in a pod, it automatically enrolls with Fleet, Elastic’s centralized management system, using the specified configuration values. After enrollment, Fleet provides full control over the agent, including its health status, configuration of integrations, and data ingestion. This setup enables centralized observability and security by ingesting and analyzing data in Elasticsearch, with visualization and management provided through Kibana.

https://static-www.elastic.co/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt5e3108df764baac1/68641b1dbf423e9e9edd790b/fleet.png,fleet.pngStep-by-Step: Deploying Elastic Agent on Amazon EKS

Let’s break down the process, based on Elastic’s official documentation:

agent: fleet: enabled: true url: token:

  • Apply the configuration and deploy the add-on to your EKS cluster.

https://static-www.elastic.co/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt7300dd074502dc14/68641b2bf44b170fd878aec2/elastic-agent.png,elastic-agent.png

Note: We recommend selecting configuration Override.