Month: March 2016

Enlarge / The dwarf planet Pluto (colors enhanced to show differences). (credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

When the New Horizons spacecraft sent back its first images of Pluto in July, the view was glorious and extraordinary. It’s not every day that we get to see a (dwarf) planet up close for the first time. As planetary scientists scrambled to put the pieces of their blown minds back together, we got some initial observations and hypotheses about Pluto’s surprising surface. But the bulk of the data from New Horizons’ brief encounter had yet to be transmitted back to Earth. As that data continues to stream in, more detailed science is being done.

This week in Science, a stack of five papers lays the foundation for that science by describing Pluto’s geology and atmosphere, as well as that of Charon and the smaller satellites orbiting the dwarf planet with the big heart.

That includes a basic description of the Plutonian landscape—at least the hemisphere that greeted the New Horizons spacecraft on approach. The lower quality data from the other side will eventually be analyzed as well.

You've probably heard the story about how Neanderthals were living in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, when suddenly a bunch of Homo sapiens came pouring out of Africa about 70 thousand years ago. 30 thousand years later, pretty much all the Neanderthals were dead. Many anthropologists believe that Homo sapiens killed off our large-browed cousins in a quest to dominate the Eurasian continent. But over the past 10 years, that view has changed radically thanks to new techniques for sequencing ancient DNA.

Now, two new studies make it even less likely that modern humans killed off the Neanderthals. Instead, we interbred with them at least three separate times, and our ancestors were likely sharing tools with them half a million years ago.

A mysterious common ancestor

Writing in Nature, a team of scientists recount how they carefully sequenced the DNA from a mysterious group of 430 thousand-year-old humans found in Sima de los Huesos, a cavern in Spain's Atapuerca mountains. Thanks to careful preservation of the remains, they were able to extract both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, allowing them to analyze genetic contributions from the group's mothers and fathers. What they discovered has upended the classic story of how Neanderthals got to Europe, and when. The Sima hominins are clearly early Neanderthals, living in Spain far earlier than expected.

An unredacted version of an appeal document. (credit: 4th Circuit Court of Appeals via Wired)

In the summer of 2013, secure e-mail service Lavabit was ordered by a federal judge to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one of its users. Rather than comply with the order, Levison shut down his entire company. He said what the government was seeking would have endangered the privacy of all of his 410,000 users.

Later, he did provide the private key as a lengthy printout in tiny type.

In court papers related to the Lavabit controversy, the target of the investigation was redacted, but it was widely assumed to be Edward Snowden. He was known to have used the service, and the charges against the target were espionage and theft of government property, the same charges Snowden faced.

(credit: Noel Hidalgo)

Denver police officers performed searches on state and federal criminal justice databases that were not work-related and instead were made to help officers' in the romance department and to assist friends, according to an independent department monitor. The report said that punishment, usually a written reprimand instead of being charged criminally, is not enough to deter future abuse of the National Crime information Center (NCIC) and the Colorado Crime Information Center (CCIC) databases.

"When used appropriately, they can be powerful tools to investigate crime," the report stated. "But the misuse of these databases for personal, non-law enforcement purposes may compromise public trust and result in harm to community members. We believe that the reprimands that are generally imposed on DPD (Denver Police Department) officers who misuse the databases do not reflect the seriousness of that violation, and may not sufficiently deter future misuse."

The report by Independent Monitor Nicholas Mitchell listed a host of wrongful searches, including an officer getting a phone number of a woman he met on assignment, and an officer running the license plate of a man for a friend who then stalked that person. None of the 25 Denver officers found to have abused the crime databases was ever charged with any access crime. The harshest penalty was a three-day suspension. Civilians who accessed the databases without authorization, however, most likely would be charged with hacking.

Researchers were able to reproduce bit-flipping attacks on Crucial Ballistix DDR4 DIMMs like those shown here.

Physical weaknesses in memory chips that make computers and servers susceptible to hack attacks dubbed "Rowhammer" are more exploitable than previously thought and extend to DDR4 modules, not just DDR3, according to a recently published research paper.

The paper, titled How Rowhammer Could Be Used to Exploit Weaknesses in Computer Hardware, arrived at that conclusion by testing the integrity of dual in-line memory modules, or DIMMs, using diagnostic techniques that hadn't previously been applied to finding the vulnerability. The tests showed many of the DIMMs were vulnerable to a phenomenon known as "bitflipping," in which 0s were converted to 1s and vice versa. The report was published by Third I/O, an Austin, Texas-based provider of high-speed bandwidth and super computing technologies. The findings were presented over the weekend at the Semicon China conference.

"Based on the analysis by Third I/O, we believe that this problem is significantly worse than what is being reported," the paper warned. "And it is still visible on some DDR4 memory modules."

On Thursday, the US Department of Transportation (DOT) announced that it would partner with Sidewalk Labs, a city-focused research group that’s a subsidiary of Alphabet (formerly known as Google), to give one US city an overhaul of its traffic analytics infrastructure.

The two institutions said they’d give the chosen city free access to a new analytics platform developed by Sidewalk Labs called Flow, which takes data from Google Maps, Waze and a variety of unspecified sensors to tell city planners which areas of the city are congested, which would be better served by mass transit, and where the city’s transportation resources should be pooled.

The city that gets access to Flow will be the winner of the Smart City Challenge, an ongoing contest sponsored by the DOT in which participant cities must show that they have plans to work technology into their existing transportation network. The finalist cities include Austin, TX; Columbus, OH; Denver, CO; Kansas City, MO; Pittsburgh, PA; Portland, OR; and San Francisco, CA.

Welcome to The Lab, a mini-game collection launching in April as a freebie for all SteamVR users. (credit: Valve Software)

SAN FRANCISCO—At last year's Game Developers Conference, the SteamVR-powered HTC Vive was a brand new prototype being unveiled publicly for the first time. At this year's show, the VR headset is just a few weeks away from a consumer launch, just behind the much-hyped Oculus Rift.

To promote that launch, Valve is hosting a giant, invite-only SteamVR showcase suite at GDC, packed full of launch-window VR demos. We'll have thoughts on more Vive games and software soon, but for now, we wanted to share our hands-on experiences with the two biggest Vive exclusives unveiled this week: The Lab, and Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine.

VR Wii Sports? Or VR NintendoLand?

The Lab is remarkable because it's Valve's first title with actual VR gameplay, as opposed to the minimally interactive Portal-and Dota 2-themed demos we'd seen at prior events; immersive and cool as they were, we wouldn't call them "games," per se. The Lab also happens to be the first new "game" released by Valve since the closed-beta launch of Dota 2 in 2011. Fans hoping for an epic multiplayer franchise or a lasting, Valve-caliber adventure will instead have to settle on a polished suite of Vive indoctrination mini-games.

(credit: HESS telescope)

We're rightly proud of the Large Hadron Collider, which accelerates protons up to 7 Tera-electron Volts before smashing them together. But the Milky Way regularly hurls protons towards Earth that have energies a thousand times higher than that, in the Peta-electron Volt (PeV) range. Astrophysicists refer to the mysterious sources of PeV particles as “PeVatrons."

What can possibly be boosting particles to these levels? A new paper figures out how many of the high-energy protons are being produced and finds one plausible source: the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center.

Rather than looking for high-energy protons, the authors track them indirectly. Depending on their interactions with the environment, the accelerated protons can produce gamma rays, which are high-energy photons. The energy of these photons are related to the energy of the initial particles.

Elizabethkingia anophelis growing on a blood agar plate. (credit: CDC's Special Bacteriology Reference Lab)

An elderly Michigan resident is the latest to die from a rare and unexplained bacterial outbreak that has sickened 54 people in Wisconsin, killing 17, heath officials confirmed Thursday.

The bacteria, Elizabethkingia anopheles, is commonly found in the environment but rarely infects humans. Historically, outbreaks of the bacteria haven’t reached more than around 10 people, making the outbreak in Wisconsin—and now Michigan—the largest ever recorded.

Investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have teamed up with state and local authorities to try to track down the source of the bacteria, which is so far unknown. Since the beginning of last November, the outbreak has spread to at least 12 counties in two states.