Month: November 2018

Enlarge / An employee working for the manufacturer of solar batteries, Sonnen GmbH, in the Bavarian village of Wildpoldsried in southern Germany is pictured on July 5, 2016. (credit: CHRISTOF STACHE/AFP/Getty Images)

In September, South Australia confirmed a plan to set up an AU$100 million (USD $72 million) fund to help households purchase home energy storage batteries. Households could receive subsidies of up to AU$6,000 (USD $4,300) on a purchase of a battery that would store electricity either from a solar-panel system or from the South Australian grid. The electricity could then be used during an emergency or a blackout.

After a year as the home of the world's largest grid-tied battery (built by Tesla), South Australia is becoming a hub for battery investment.

Other, non-Tesla battery makers are taking note. This week, German battery maker Sonnen started producing batteries at an old GM Holden factory in Elizabeth, South Australia. Sonnen has long experience in the home energy storage market, deploying batteries for German households before Tesla announced its Powerwall. Now, it intends to use its Elizabeth factory to produce batteries not only for South Australians who hope to take advantage of the government's new subsidies but also to ship home storage batteries to other places in the Asia market, according to PV Magazine.

Enlarge (credit: Juliancolton / Wikimedia)

Criminal hackers continue to exploit a feature in Autodesk’s widely used AutoCAD program in an attempt to steal valuable computer-assisted designs for bridges, factory buildings, and other projects, researchers said Tuesday.

The attacks arrive in spear-phishing emails and in some cases postal packages that contain design documents and plans. Included in the same directory are camouflaged files formatted in AutoLISP, an AutoCAD-specific dialect of the LISP programming language. When targets open the design document, they may inadvertently cause the AutoLISP file to be executed. While modern versions of AutoCAD by default display a warning that a potentially unsafe script will run, the warnings can be disregarded or suppressed altogether. To make the files less conspicuous, the attackers have set their properties to be hidden in Windows and their contents to be encrypted.

The attacks aren’t new. Similar ones occurred as long ago as 2005, before AutoCAD provided the same set of robust defenses against targeted malware it does now. The attacks continued to go strong in 2009. A specific campaign recently spotted by security firm Forcepoint was active as recently as this year and has been active since at least 2014, an indication that malware targeting blueprints isn’t going away any time soon.

Enlarge (credit: Wyss Institute, Harvard)

If you have ADHD, chances are higher that your siblings do, too. Estimates differ as to how strong the connection is, but the arrows point in the same direction: genetics helps determine someone's risk for ADHD. Beyond that, we still have myriad questions and not many answers—which genes play a role? And how do those genes affect someone's ability to focus or sit still?

Some conditions, like sickle-cell anemia, rest entirely on a single small genetic change; but others, like schizophrenia, rest on a dizzying array of genetic differences, all seemingly linked to an infinitesimally tiny increase in risk.

ADHD is much closer to schizophrenia. A paper published in Nature Genetics this week looked at genetic data from more than 50,000 people, finding 12 different regions of DNA that seemed to play a role in increasing ADHD risk.

Following the success of Nintendo's hot-selling series of "Classic Edition" plug-and-play HDMI systems, Sony is jumping into the fray this week with the PlayStation Classic. Unfortunately, the $100 emulation box, collecting 20 early CD-ROM games, is a bare-bones experience that comes with a lot of compromises that get in the way of even nostalgic appreciation for the era.

It starts from the moment you turn the system on, with a pixelated, no-frills menu that doesn't even offer placeholder background music while you navigate. Don't go looking for on-screen game manuals or any sort of museum-style, behind-the-scenes features either—the best you'll get is a QR code link to an online manual (which returns a 404 error as of this writing).

Following the success of Nintendo's hot-selling series of "Classic Edition" plug-and-play HDMI systems, Sony is jumping into the fray this week with the PlayStation Classic. Unfortunately, the $100 emulation box, collecting 20 early CD-ROM games, is a bare-bones experience that comes with a lot of compromises that get in the way of even nostalgic appreciation for the era.

It starts from the moment you turn the system on, with a pixelated, no-frills menu that doesn't even offer placeholder background music while you navigate. Don't go looking for on-screen game manuals or any sort of museum-style, behind-the-scenes features either—the best you'll get is a QR code link to an online manual (which returns a 404 error as of this writing).