Month: August 2016

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The world has seen the most unsettling attack yet resulting from the so-called Rowhammer exploit, which flips individual bits in computer memory. It's a technique that's so surgical and controlled that it allows one machine to effectively steal the cryptographic keys of another machine hosted in the same cloud environment.

Until now, Rowhammer has been a somewhat clumsy and unpredictable attack tool because it was hard to control exactly where data-corrupting bit flips happened. While previous research demonstrated that it could be used to elevate user privileges and break security sandboxes, most people studying Rowhammer said there was little immediate danger of it being exploited maliciously to hijack the security of computers that use vulnerable chips. The odds of crucial data being stored in a susceptible memory location made such hacks largely a matter of chance that was stacked against the attacker. In effect, Rowhammer was more a glitch than an exploit.

Now, computer scientists have developed a significantly more refined Rowhammer technique they call Flip Feng Shui. It manipulates deduplication operations that many cloud hosts use to save memory resources by sharing identical chunks of data used by two or more virtual machines. Just as traditional Feng Shui aims to create alignment or harmony in a home or office, Flip Feng Shui can massage physical memory in a way that causes crypto keys and other sensitive data to be stored in locations known to be susceptible to Rowhammer.

When we imagine the world of the Cretaceous period, millions of years before the Chicxulub meteorite smashed into the Gulf of Mexico, usually we think of gigantic animals. Dinosaurs smashed through the forests, and giant flying reptiles called pterosaurs ruled the skies with their 10-meter wingspans. But a new discovery of a small pterosaur, with a wingspan of only about a meter, has overturned this popular idea.

This unnamed pterosaur, likely related to the much larger azhdarchid pterosaurs of the same period, is described in a paper published in Royal Society Open Science. Two fragments of its skeleton were discovered on Hornby Island, British Columbia, providing just enough material for scientists to verify that it was not simply an adolescent version of a larger animal. Based on the telltale shape of its vertebrae, the researchers are convinced it's not a bird, but they don't have enough remains to say for certain where this new species would fit into the evolutionary tree. Study lead Elizabeth Martin-Silverstone told Nature, "It’s quite different from other animals we’ve studied. There hasn’t really been evidence before of small pterosaurs at this time period." This finding is a surprise, because many paleontologists believed that pterosaurs evolved to be larger and larger as the Cretaceous wore on.

These small pterosaurs probably lived alongside the first birds. This revelation overturns one hypothesis about why the pterosaurs died out, which is that birds out-competed the small pterosaurs—leaving only the big pterosaurs, who went extinct in the aftermath of the same bolide impact that wiped out the large, non-winged dinosaurs. If birds and small pterosaurs co-existed for millions of years, it seems unlikely that the story was as simple as birds out-competing them.

Enlarge (credit: Lockheed Martin)

At a breakfast with defense reporters this week, Marine Corps Lt. General Robert Walsh, the commanding general of the Corps' Combat Development Command, said that directed energy weapons are "where we want to go." That includes eventually mounting lasers on the F-35B fighter—and virtually everything else in the Marine Corps' inventory.

"As soon as we could miniaturize them, we would put them on F-35s, Cobra [attack helicopters]… any of those kind of attack aircraft," Walsh said, according to a report from National Defense. But given how much difficulty Defense Department researchers have had reducing the size and power required for directed energy weapons, that day is still a long way off—and the objective right now is to get a system that could be flown on a C-130.

The advantage of directed energy weapons, from the Marine Corps' perspective, is that they don't require ammunition (other than their energy source) and could be used defensively against missiles and even other aircraft at a much lower cost per shot than the $300,000 to $400,000 AIM-120 missiles carried by the F-35—or even the 25 millimeter rounds of its GAU-22/A cannon.

Enlarge / Gosh, I love that planet pin. (credit: billnye.com)

Bill Nye's social capital has been on the rise in recent years, as he has transitioned from a kid-friendly science show host to a no-nonsense defender of hard science (and bow ties). His polite aggression has appeared on talk shows, lecture halls, and comedy series, but none of his enjoyable bluster has come in his own series in some time.

Netflix has announced plans to change that with the introduction of Bill Nye Saves the World, a new Netflix-exclusive talk show series launching in spring 2017. In a Wednesday press release, Netflix described the show's aspirations to "refute anti-scientific claims that may be espoused by politicians, religious leaders, or titans of industry"—so the show is clearly aiming to maintain the junk-science battle that Nye has loudly fought in recent years.

Like his '90s TV series, the new Netflix show looks like it will provide equal parts comedy and hard science, as head writers have been hired for those elements (with comedian Mike Drucker and astronomer Phil Plait filling those respective roles). Though the press release didn't indicate how vulgar or extreme the humor may go, Nye's hilarious, frustrated-cursing turn on a 2015 episode of Inside Amy Schumer makes us hopeful that he'll veer a little blue when taking on topics like "vaccinations, genetically modified foods, and climate change."