Month: February 2016

Two giant Glyptodonts, covered in solid shields of armor, smash each other's little faces with spiked club tails. Just another day in the Pleistocene. (credit: Peter Schouten)

If you missed the Pleistocene in the Americas, you never got to see all the fantastic megafauna we once had here: mastodons, sabre tooth cats, giant sloths, hippo-rhino-looking Toxodons...and 3,000-pound armored beasts called Glyptodonts. Now a new DNA analysis reveals that Glyptodonts are extinct cousins of present-day armadillos. Except these creatures were the size of small cars and could smash you with their spiky, clubbed tails.

At least, some species of Glyptodont could smash you—others did not have clubbed tails, though all of them would have looked to our modern eyes like freakishly outsized armadillos. What's interesting is that these creatures evolved to their massive sizes in a relatively short time. The researchers, who published their findings in Current Biology, say the last common ancestor of Glyptodonts and today's armadillos was a 175-pound animal who toddled around South America about 35 million years ago.

Since that evolutionary divergence, some Glyptodonts, such as the massive Doedicurus (the one with the clubbed tail), grew to 1.5 tons in weight.

(credit: IBM)

Carbon nanotubes are small and can be semiconducting, which makes lots of people excited about using them as a replacement for features etched in silicon. But there are two big problems: the reactions that produce them create a random mix of metallic and semiconducting nanotubes, and it's really difficult to get them to go precisely where you need them to in order to properly wire up a processor.

Now, a joint IBM-academic team has used those difficulties to their advantage. They've developed a process in which nanotubes are used to randomly wire up part of a chip that's then used to generate cryptographic information, providing an inherently secure on-chip facility for hardware-based encryption.

Most digital cryptography depends on the ability to generate a unique series of bits that acts as a key. Hardware-based cryptography generally relies on a key that's permanently wired into the chip itself. While effective, different techniques for storing the keys have various vulnerabilities, from being subject to external snooping to producing different results when the environmental conditions are changed.

The open source "Desa" cellular network in a Papua, Indonesia village was set up by researchers from Cal Berkeley's TIER center. Facebook wants to spur the further spread of cellular networks to isolated communities through open source hardware contributed to its Telecom Infra Project. (credit: University of California at Berkeley - TIER)

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Facebook announced the launch of a new open source hardware effort to extend cellular wireless service and hopefully accelerate the scaling up of telecommunications infrastructure and the development of new wireless broadband technologies, including 5G wireless. The program, called the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), is also working on providing currently unserved rural communities with wireless network efforts. A pilot 4G network is already underway in the Philippines, and Facebook has a project in planning for the Scottish Highlands.

Modeled on the Open Compute Project, which tackled data center computing and networking hardware, TIP already has 30 participating members (including a number of telecommunications and networking hardware providers alongside global and regional telecommunications carriers). TIP will focus on open designs for three areas of telecommunications hardware and software: access points, the backhaul network to connect them, and network core and management systems.

"We know from our experience with the Open Compute Project that the best way to accelerate the pace of innovation is for companies to collaborate and to work in the open," Jay Parikh, Global Head of Engineering and Infrastructure at Facebook, wrote in a post announcing TIP. "To kick-start this work, TIP members such as Facebook, Intel, and Nokia have pledged to contribute an initial suite of reference designs, while other members such as operators Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom will help define and deploy the technology as it fits their needs."

Cyanogen Inc. has announced a new feature for the upcoming Marshmallow version of its commercial Android skin, Cyanogen OS. The company is launching the "Mods" platform, a way to build apps "directly into the OS." The platform's biggest participant is none other than Microsoft, which has built Skype, Cortana, OneNote, and Hyperlapse apps for Cyanogen's platform.

Cyanogen and Microsoft previously announced a "Strategic Partnership," which explains the two companies' almost joint rollout of this feature. The partnership covers "Bing services, Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, and Microsoft Office," and it seems that most of those products are represented here. Four of the six announced Mods are Microsoft products. Configure the Mod platform appropriately and it almost seems like a Microsoft version of Android with Cyanogen as the intermediary.

Cyanogen's branding of this feature is rather confusing. "Cyanogen Inc.," the company, already makes an open source Android skin called "CyanogenMod." Cyanogen then takes CyanogenMod and adds some proprietary features to make "Cyanogen OS," a commercial version of its Android skin that it tries to license to manufacturers. That was hard enough for some people to keep straight, and now this new feature is only for Cyanogen OS, and it's called "Mods." If you're keeping track, Cyanogen Inc., Cyanogen OS, CyanogenMod, and Cyanogen's Mod platform are now all separate entities.

(credit: Google)

Google Fiber said on Monday that it plans to bring its gigabit Internet service to Huntsville, Alabama. But instead of laying its own fiber, Google will offer service over a network that is being built by the city-owned Huntsville Utilities. Huntsville will lease space on the network to Google so it can offer Internet service. But it's not an exclusive deal, so other Internet providers could offer broadband over the same fiber. Huntsville, a city of nearly 190,000 residents, has been planning the fiber build for more than a year.

City officials "see it as a low-risk investment, as compared to administering the gigabit Internet themselves, which would require a massive increase in personnel in an arena where they have limited expertise," local news station WHNT reported today. Google Fiber should be available to the first Huntsville customers by the middle of 2017, but it could take a few years to extend service throughout the city, the report said.

Google Fiber offers service in Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri; Provo, Utah; Austin, Texas; and Atlanta, Georgia. Huntsville is now one of six additional cities where Google says it will offer service. Google lists 11 other cities as "potential" Fiber locations, bringing the total of possible deployments to 21 metro areas.