Month: February 2017

A 3D XPoint wafer. (credit: Intel)

In 2015, Intel and Micron announced 3D XPoint (pronounced "three dee cross point"), a new form of high-speed, non-volatile, solid-state storage. But we're still waiting for products that actually use the technology. The first 3D XPoint storage should hit the market this year. Branded "Optane," Intel briefly documented (on a PDF that has since been pulled from its website) the first specs of the first of these products: the Intel SSD DC P4800X is a 375GB half-height, half-length PCIe NVMe card aimed at enterprise markets. Optane should also eventually come in 750GB and 1.5TB versions. Taiwanese site PCADV spotted the specs while they were up.

When Intel announced 3D XPoint, the company said that it would be 1,000 times faster than NAND flash, 10 times denser than (volatile) DRAM, and with 1,000 times the endurance of NAND, too, which would greatly reduce the susceptibility of 3D XPoint drives to write-induced failures. The specs of this first SSD reflect these ambitions, but perhaps not in quite the way people would have expected.

P4800X spec sheet. (credit: PCADV)

The 2,400MB/s read speed is high, but it's not king of the hill. Introduced in 2014, Intel's SSD DC P3700, the company's nearest equivalent product using NAND flash technology, boasts up to 2,800MB/s reads. Samsung's consumer-oriented 960 EVO manages 3,200MB/s read performance.

Enlarge (credit: Wordfence)

Attacks on websites running an outdated version of WordPress are increasing at a viral rate. Almost 2 million pages have been defaced since a serious vulnerability in the content management system came to light nine days ago. The figure represents a 26 percent spike in the past 24 hours.

A rogues' gallery of sites have been hit by the defacements. They include conservative commentator Glenn Beck's glennbeck.com, Linux distributor Suse's news.opensuse.org, the US Department of Energy-supported jcesr.org, the Utah Office of Tourism's travel.utah.gov, and many more. At least 19 separate campaigns are participating and, in many cases, competing against each other in the defacements. Virtually all of the vandalism is being carried out by exploiting a severe vulnerability WordPress fixed in WordPress version 4.7.2, which was released on January 26. In an attempt to curb attacks before automatic updates installed the patch, the severity of the bug—which resides in a programming interface known as REST—wasn't disclosed until February 1.

Enlarge / A small, ingestible voltaic cell powered by the acidic fluids in the stomach. (credit: MIT | Diemut Strebe)

Move over, wearables. Soon, ingestibles that run on the power of a grumbling gut may be the go-to health-tracking devices.

New wireless gadgets could deliver drugs and continuously measure temperature, all while harvesting energy from churning, acidic gut fluids, researchers report this week in Nature Biomedical Engineering. Prototypes have successfully made their way through the bowels of pigs, and the design will need tweaking for human use. But the findings suggest that next-generation ingestible devices will be able to safely harvest energy for a slew of health tracking and monitoring purposes—potentially even for extended periods of time.

Consumable contraptions have already proved useful for video capture and health monitoring. They measure things like breathing, temperature, pH, drug delivery, heart rate, and pressure. But most gulp-able gadgets still require an old-fashioned battery, which can cause life-threatening burns and injuries in living tissue.

Enlarge / L-R: Peter Rander, Argo AI COO; Ken Washington, Ford vice president of research and advanced engineering; Mark Fields, Ford president and CEO; Bryan Salesky, Argo AI CEO; Raj Nair, Ford executive vice president, product development, and chief technical officer; and Laura Merling, Ford Smart Mobility LLC vice president of autonomous vehicle solutions. Salesky and Rander are alumni of Carnegie Mellon National Robotics Engineering Center and former leaders on the self-driving car teams of Google and Uber, respectively. (credit: Ford)

If you had to pick a single buzzword to define the auto industry of late, it would have to be "mobility." Car companies are coming to grips with demographic and socioeconomic changes and the rise of the sharing economy and are moving beyond the old way of doing business, i.e., just building cars and selling them to customers. Ford has been on the leading edge of this trend, announcing in August last year that it plans to put an SAE level 4 autonomous vehicle into mass production as a ride-sharing service in 2021. Today, it announced that, as part of that plan, it is investing $1 billion over five years in a company called Argo AI, a startup led by the former leads of Google and Uber's self-driving programs.

"The next decade will be defined by the automation of the automobile, and autonomous vehicles will have as significant an impact on society as Ford's moving assembly line did 100 years ago," said Ford president and CEO Mark Fields. "As Ford expands to be an auto and a mobility company, we believe that investing in Argo AI will create significant value for our shareholders by strengthening Ford's leadership in bringing self-driving vehicles to market in the near term and by creating technology that could be licensed to others in the future."

This isn't the first strategic investment in self-driving technology from the Blue Oval. As part of last August's reveal, the company announced it was investing in lidar sensor-maker Velodyne and 3D-mapping company Civil Maps. Ford also purchased a machine-vision company called SAIPS and entered into a licensing agreement with another, Nirenberg Neuroscience.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Boston Globe )

Remember when that pharmaceutical trade group launched a flashy ad campaign to convince consumers that they were different from the price-gouging Shkrelis of the industry? Well, one of their members just took an old, cheap drug and priced a year’s worth of it at $89,000.

The steroid drug, deflazacort, which treats Duchenne muscular dystrophy, has been approved overseas for years and is sold as a generic. Duchenne affects about 15,000 people in the US. Families here have been importing a year’s worth for around $1,200.

But Marathon Pharmaceuticals (a member of the PhRMA trade group) finally got it FDA-approved Thursday under an “orphan drug” status, which is for drugs that treat rare diseases. Under that status, Marathon has exclusive rights to sell deflazacort in the US for seven years.

Why did a commercial organization endorse the SLS rocket? (credit: NASA)

This week, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, which counts rocket builders SpaceX and Blue Origin among its executive members, made news by declaring its support for NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. The organization’s new chairman, Alan Stern, announced during a conference that “we see many benefits in the development of NASA’s SLS.” This caused a stir in the commercial space community.

Later, during an interview with Ars, Stern explained that the commercial space organization has, in the past, engaged in a “bruising battle” over the government’s massive rocket and its influential prime contractor Boeing. The commercial space industry group (of which Boeing is not a member) contended the private sector could deliver the same capability as the SLS for far less than the $2 billion NASA has spent annually this decade to develop the rocket. The SLS will initially be able to heft 70 metric tons to low Earth orbit, but that could grow to 130 metric tons by the late 2020s.

But now, Stern said the organization believes the SLS will enable the aims of commercial companies to develop businesses on the Moon, as well as support asteroid mining and other ventures his members are interested in. “We are taking a long view,” Stern said. “This is clearly to the advantage of the expansion of commercial spaceflight. Now, with a new administration and a new Congress, we wanted to put our stake down on the side of SLS.”

An encouraging garbage can. (credit: Ryan Mickle - Flickr)

Too often, science news extrapolates wildly from the science in question. Take, for example, that time a small study done in mice mutated into diet advice for humans. Press releases are sometimes the origin of the hype; other times, the hype might be added by reporters and editors for some extra juice in the story.

But sometimes, the extrapolation is embedded in the science itself. Researchers are not immune to bias, and sometimes they make unsupported claims based on their data. A paper in PNAS this week takes a big leap from its evidence to claim that the emotion of pride “evolved to guide behavior to elicit valuation and respect from others.” The paper itself has some nifty findings, but getting from the data to the conclusions requires the mental equivalent of an Olympic long jump.

You think humor is just as important as the next guy

What the researchers found—and this is the neat part—is that we think highly of other people who have traits that we ourselves would be proud of. More than 1,300 people from 16 different countries answered a survey about traits like sense of humor, generosity, athletic skill, popularity, and responsibility.