Month: October 2017

Enlarge (credit: JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/Getty Images)

Samsung will lose another major executive soon. Shortly after posting the company's third quarter financial results, CEO and Vice Chairman of Samsung Electronics Oh-Hyun Kwon announced he is leaving the company in March 2018.

In a letter to employees, Kwon offered a statement:

It is something I had been thinking long and hard about for quite some time. It has not been an easy decision, but I feel I can no longer put it off. As we are confronted with unprecedented crisis inside out, I believe that time has now come for the company to start anew, with a new spirit and young leadership to better respond to challenges arising from the rapidly changing IT industry.

The "unprecedented crisis" is apparently a reference to Samsung Group's de facto leader and Vice Chairman, Lee Jae-yong (aka, Jay Y. Lee) being sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of bribery, embezzlement, capital flight, and perjury charges. Lee Jae-yong's conviction was part of a bribery scandal that reached all the way to the president of South Korea, Park Geun-hye, who was impeached last year is also serving time in prison.

Enlarge / Note the "9999999" Mirian that allows for infinite loot box purchases.

The presence of randomized "loot boxes" in games has received renewed critical attention of late, with aggregator OpenCritic planning to flag the controversial business model on its site's review collections. Now, some gamers are using a glitch to get around part of the loot box grind in the recently released Middle-Earth: Shadow of War.

PC Shadow of War players can get infinite amounts of Mirian—one of the game's fictional currencies—by using a script that edits memory addresses through the popular Cheat Engine tool. In and of itself, that's not all that exceptional; "infinite money" cheats and exploits are relatively common in single-player games (and even in some online games, with much more disruptive results).

What makes the "infinite Mirian" cheat more significant is that it can be used to purchase infinite Silver War Chests, which in turn grant new "Epic" orc followers and consumable in-game items. These followers and items can be earned through regular game play, but doing so requires a lot of grinding through battles and challenges, especially near the end of the game, according to reviews.

Enlarge / Synthetic biology (artist's conception). (credit: Harvard University)

Synthetic biology—our attempt to engineer living organisms—has put a lot of effort into making genetic circuitry mimic what we do in silicon. Logical gates, amplifiers, and more have all been implemented using DNA and proteins. While these feats of genetic engineering have been impressive, how we'd put these genetic circuits to use hasn't always been clear. It's easy to imagine a logical gate in a bacteria would be useful for various biotechnology applications, but there haven't been many opportunities when someone put one to use.

An exception to this was reported in this week's edition of Nature Biotechnology. A team at Duke University has engineered a bacterial population that uses engineered genetic circuitry to express a protein only in specific locations. The researchers then printed these bacteria onto a surface and processed them to coat the protein in gold. The result is a tiny gold dome that makes a great pressure sensor.

Bacterial circuitry

The circuit itself is interesting in its own right. One part of it is pretty simple: a gene encodes a protein that feeds back to the gene itself, making sure it's active. Thus, once this gene becomes activated, it stays activated unless something else happens.

Enlarge / It sucks air in and separates carbon dioxide out. (credit: Climeworks - Zev Starr-Tambor)

In a press conference presentation Wednesday, Reykjavik Energy’s Edda Aradóttir described the company’s new project as “turning the CO₂ troll to stone.” If deployed at scale, the technology behind this could make a big difference in charting a better climate future—capturing CO₂ gas and locking it away underground before it can add to the growing greenhouse effect.

Last year, the people behind the project, termed “CarbFix,” published a paper outlining the remarkable success they’d had in pilot operation. CO₂ captured from a geothermal power plant (the hot geothermal water comes up with some volcanic CO₂ as well) was injected back down into the Icelandic basalt, where it reacted with the rock and turned into carbonate minerals. This is the ultimate fate for CO₂ injected underground everywhere, but it usually takes hundreds to thousands of years. In the basalt, the CO₂ had mineralized in a matter of years, making this a particularly attractive way to deal with the CO₂ troll.

Meanwhile, a young company in Switzerland called Climeworks was opening its first plant to capture CO₂—not from relatively concentrated smokestack effluent, but from ambient air. CO₂ is much more dilute in ambient air, comprising about 0.04 percent of atmospheric gas currently. So capturing it economically is much more difficult. For that reason, efforts to develop this particular technology have been slow in coming.