Month: May 2018

Enlarge (credit: Michael Davis-Burchat / Flickr)

Although an electric bus smells a heck of a lot better than a diesel bus, it’s obviously important to remember that electric doesn’t really mean zero emissions unless your electric grid is fossil-fuel-free. You may have seen calculations showing that the equivalent miles per gallon of an electric vehicle varies in different parts of the US depending on the local mix of power plants. But a new study focused on Beijing shows that the devil is in even smaller details.

To help improve its incredible air pollution problem, China is pushing electric vehicles at the same time it increases the share of its electricity produced by renewables rather than coal, which has dominated. To see what effect this change would have, a group of researchers led by Harvard’s Xinyu Chen modeled Beijing’s transportation and electrical systems in a variety of scenarios for the year 2020.

When do you charge?

The base scenario proposed by the researchers included no electric vehicles, but they also examined cases in which the percentage of Beijing’s electricity produced by wind ranged from zero to 40 percent. That equates to as much as a 29-percent cut in CO₂ emissions and a 14-percent reduction in nitrogen oxide air pollution. The interesting thing is how the various electric vehicle scenarios change those numbers.

Enlarge / Wait, how much does that cost? (credit: Getty | BSIP)

A woman seeking treatment from a New Jersey hospital in October 2016 for an ear injury was charged $5,751 for her treatment—even though that treatment only consisted of an ice pack and a bandage, according to an ongoing investigation by Vox into hospital emergency room billing.

The woman, Jessica Pell, had fainted and hit her head on a table, slicing her ear in the process. She initially went to the emergency department at Hoboken University Medical Center to patch up the injury. But she decided to leave and get treatment elsewhere after she learned that the doctor who would see her there was out of network for her insurance plan and would therefore cost more than an in-network doctor.

“I decided to decline treatment because I can’t really afford any surprise bills right now,” she said. “The bill I’d probably incur would not be worth saving my ear, which was sad but a choice I had to make.”

Enlarge (credit: Majkic et al. 2018)

At first glance, it doesn’t look like much: a few uneven lines etched into the soft, chalky outer layer of a small, thin flint flake. But a group of archaeologists claims those uneven lines are a deliberate marking, making the 3.5cm-long flake the latest piece of evidence for symbolic thought among Neanderthals.

Kiik-Koba Cave overlooks the Zuya River in the Crimean Mountains. First excavated in the 1920s, the sediment layers that filled the cave contained evidence of a long history of Neanderthal occupation. The engraved flake came from a layer dating to between 35,486 and 37,026 years old. Archaeologists found the skeleton of a Neanderthal infant in the same layer, leaving no doubt about who lived at Kiik-Koba when the stone tools were made and used.

Several recent discoveries, including cave art and shell jewelry at sites in Spain, leave little doubt that Neanderthals were capable of symbolic thinking. Archaeologists want to understand more about the origins and development of symbolism in both modern humans and our hominin relatives. But interpreting the evidence is sometimes a challenge, because early symbolic objects are, by their nature, relatively simplistic. That makes it easy to dismiss a real symbolic marking as an accident or to make a fuss over the symbolic meaning of an accidental mark.

Enlarge (credit: John Karakatsanis / Flickr)

Over the past few years, there has been a steady evolution in Rowhammer, the once largely theoretical attack that exploits physical defects in memory chips to tamper with the security of the devices they run on. On Thursday, researchers are unveiling the most practical demonstration yet of Rowhammer's power and reach: an exploit that remotely executes malicious code on Android phones by harnessing their graphical processors.

Dubbed GLitch, the exploit is the first to show that GPUs can flip individual bits stored in dynamic random-access memory. The advance gives attackers greater flexibility over previous techniques that relied solely on CPUs. It's also the first Rowhammer attack that uses standard JavaScript to compromise a smartphone, meaning it can be executed when users do nothing more than visit a malicious website. Another key innovation: on average, GLitch takes less than two minutes to compromise a device, a significant improvement over previous Rowhammer exploits.

GLitch gets its name and idiosyncratic capitalization because it uses the WebGL programming interface for rendering graphics to trigger a known glitch in DDR3 and DDR4 dual in-line memory modules, or DIMMs. The term Rowhammer was coined because the exploit class accesses—or "hammers"—specific memory blocks known as rows inside a DIMM thousands of times per second. Attackers use it to alter crucial pieces of data by changing zeros to ones and vice versa. The physical weakness is the result of ever smaller dimensions of the silicon. With less space between each DRAM cell, it becomes increasingly hard to prevent one cell from interacting electrically with its neighbors.