Month: March 2018

Enlarge / Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin sees what you did there, Russia. (credit: Getty Images)

The Treasury Department announced new economic sanctions today on the Russian Federation and on individuals and organizations implicated in interference with the 2016 US presidential elections—just as the Department of Homeland Security released a new warning of new "Russian government cyber activity" aimed at the US government and US critical infrastructure providers.

The sanctions are being carried out as part of an amendment to the Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama in 2015. The Trump administration imposed the new sanctions—the first the administration has imposed under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), which was passed by Congress last year—a month after officially blaming Russian intelligence for the NotPetya worm.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced the sanctions, explaining that "the administration is confronting and countering malign Russian cyber activity, including their attempted interference in US elections, destructive cyber-attacks, and intrusions targeting critical infrastructure." The new sanctions, he said, are part of "a broader effort to address the ongoing nefarious attacks emanating from Russia. Treasury intends to impose additional CAATSA sanctions, informed by our intelligence community, to hold Russian government officials and oligarchs accountable for their destabilizing activities by severing their access to the US financial system."

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Samsung's Galaxy S9 will officially begin shipping in the US on Friday, which means time is almost up on the myriad pre-order deals on the device.

We took a in-depth look at what those deals actually entail shortly after the phone was first announced, but in short, the major carriers and Samsung itself are still offering up to $350 off the device when you trade in select phones toward a Galaxy S9 purchase. Most carriers are also dangling another $150, through bill credits or a gift card, when you switch to their service with the purchase. For many, though, the most prudent option might be to buy from Samsung, which is taking up to $350 off the purchase outright as well, and get the unlocked version of the phone.

This is all assuming you're interested in Samsung's latest, of course. If you're not, we've also got deals on Bose noise-cancelling headphones, the newest Amazon Echo, laptops from Dell and Lenovo, and much more. Take a look for yourself below.

Bugatti

The last time we looked at 3D printing in the automotive world, it was still a technique limited to startups like Divergent 3D or Local Motors. But in the last few months, there's been growing evidence that the big OEMs are waking up to the advantages of additive manufacturing. In recent weeks, we've seen Bugatti reveal that it has been 3D printing brake calipers out of titanium, followed soon after by news that Porsche has been using the technique to recreate out-of-stock parts for its classic cars.

Bugatti’s bespoke brakes

In Bugatti's case, the brand turned to 3D printing to see if it could cut some weight from the front brake calipers on the Chiron hypercar. For the production Chiron, the eight-piston calipers are made from forged aluminum alloy, resulting in a component that weighs 10.8lbs (4.9kg). By comparison, the printed version weighs just 6.4lbs (2.9kg) but manages to have a higher tensile strength. Bugatti turned to Laser Zentrum Nord in Hamburg, Germany for the project.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle)

The Great Recession from 2007 to 2009 not only claimed millions of jobs and houses, it took a toll on our health, too, according to a new study published in PNAS this week.

After the financial crisis, researchers studying a cohort of nearly 4,600 middle-aged and older adults found significant boosts in blood pressure and blood glucose levels—both contributors to health problems such as heart disease. Because the researchers had years’ worth of baseline health data on the group, they could determine that the increases were well beyond what was expected for the group based on aging and progression of preexisting health conditions alone. However, some of the increases—but not all—could be explained by some participants who stopped taking or decreased their blood pressure and diabetes medication after the recession. This appeared to be another harmful side-effect of the economic downturn.

Overall, the participants who appeared to take the hardest knocks to their health were those who were already taking medications before the recession and had the most to lose: middle-aged adults in the workforce who may fear job loss and older, more highly educated adults who owned their homes and were most likely to have invested in the stock market.

Enlarge (credit: Uber)

An Uber self-driving car collided with another vehicle in Pittsburgh on February 24 in an incident first reported by Pittsburgh's channel 11 last week. No one was seriously injured, but the incident caused serious damage to the vehicles. Uber and the driver disagree on exactly what happened in the seconds before the crash, making it unclear who was at fault.

The driver of the other car was Jessica McLemore, a mother of three children. She described the incident in a Wednesday interview with Ars Technica.

The crash occurred in Pittsburgh's Strip District. McLemore was on a four-lane road called Liberty Lane, heading Northeast, while the Uber vehicle was approaching from the opposite direction. This screenshot from Google Maps shows the intersection.

Enlarge / Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon E7 v2 die shot. (credit: Fritzchens Fritz)

Shipping in the second half of this year, the next generation of Xeon Scalable Processors (codenamed Cascade Lake) will contain hardware fixes for the Meltdown attack and certain variants of the Spectre attack. So, too, will a range of processors using the same 8th generation Core branding that some processors are already using.

Earlier this year, attacks that exploit the processor's speculative execution were published with the names Meltdown and Spectre, prompting a reaction from hardware and software companies.

The Spectre attack has two variants, numbered version 1 and version 2. Spectre version 1 attacks will need software fixes, and the nature of these attacks means that they may always need software fixes. Applications that try to build sandboxes—locked-down environments used for running potentially hostile code, such as JavaScript in the browser—will need to be examined and updated to provide robust protection against Spectre version 1.

Scott Kelly, here shown giving Ars readers a visual tour of the ISS.

Something very strange happened in the world of science news this week. A month-and-a-half-old press release, which reiterated news that was released in 2017, suddenly spawned a flurry of coverage. To make matters worse, a lot of that coverage repeated claims that range from biologically nonsensical to impossible. So if you've seen any mention of astronaut Scott Kelly's DNA this week, it's probably best if you immediately forget anything you read about it.

How did Scott Kelly's genes end up one of the hottest news stories? I really have no idea. The "news" apparently traces back to a NASA press release that came out on the last day of January. That release uses a lot of words to say that attendees of a recent workshop had agreed that preliminary findings NASA had announced a year earlier were legit. So really, the "news" here is well over a year old. Yet somehow, this release has triggered a geyser of news coverage, at major outlets including CNN, USA Today, and many others.

While this would clearly be an odd situation, it wouldn't be much of a problem if most of the coverage didn't involve a horrific butchering of biology. To understand the story, we have to understand the biology—and why Scott Kelly's journey through space could tell us something about it.