Month: December 2018

Enlarge / Two layers of one of the materials used in this work. (credit: The American Mineralogist Crystal Structure Database)

We seem to be on the cusp of a revolution in storage. Various technologies have been demonstrated that have speed approaching that of current RAM chips but can hold on to the memory when the power shuts off—all without the long-term degradation that flash experiences. Some of these, like phase-change memory and Intel's Optane, have even made it to market. But, so far at least, issues with price and capacity have kept them from widespread adoption.

But that hasn't discouraged researchers from continuing to look for the next greatest thing. In this week's edition, a joint NIST-Purdue University team has used a material that can form atomically thin sheets to make a new form of resistance-based memory. This material can be written in nanoseconds and hold on to that memory without power. The memory appears to work via a fundamentally different mechanism from previous resistance-RAM technologies, but there's a small hitch: we're not actually sure how it works.

The persistence of memristors

There is a series of partly overlapping memory storage technologies that are based on changes in electrical resistance. These are sometimes termed ReRAM and can include memristors. The basic idea is that a material can hold a bit that is read based on whether the electrical resistance is high or whether electrons flow through like it was a metal. In some of these, the resistance can be set across a spectrum that can be divided up, potentially allowing a single piece of material to hold more than one bit.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Have you ever been to a website where the back button just doesn't work? In these instances, you press "back" to go back but instead you just end up at the same page where you started. A new commit on the Chromium source (first spotted by 9to5Google) outlines a plan to stop weird website schemes like this, with a lockdown on "history manipulation" by websites. The commit reads: "Entries that are added to the back/forward list without the user's intention are marked to be skipped on subsequent back button invocations."

The back button moves backward through your Web history, and, along with the close button, it's one of the most common ways of leaving a website. This is very bad if you're a shady website designer, and sites have tried to mess with the back button by adding extra entries to your Web history. It's not hard to do this with a redirect—imagine loading example1.com from a search result, which instantly redirects you to example2.com. Both pages would get stored in your history, so pressing "back" from example2.com would send you to example1.com, which would redirect you again and add more troublesome history entries. This doesn't make it impossible to leave (quickly hitting the back button twice might work), but it does make it harder to leave, which is the end goal.

To stop this kind of history manipulation, bad history entries will soon get a "skippable" flag, which means the back button will ignore them when it navigates through the history order. One commit says Google still needs to come up with some kind of "pruning logic" to declare a website as skippable, but that could probably be done with something like a timestamp. You spent zero seconds on that redirect page, so that's probably not a good history entry.

Nuro, a startup founded by two veterans of Google's self-driving car project, has reached an important milestone: it has started making fully autonomous grocery deliveries on public streets.

Fry's Food, a brand owned by grocery giant Kroger, launched a self-driving grocery delivery program back in August in partnership with Nuro. Fry's has been using Nuro cars to deliver groceries to customers near one of its stores on East McDowell Road in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Initially, these deliveries were made by Toyota Priuses that Nuro had outfitted with its sensors and software. There were also safety drivers behind the wheel. Nuro says it has made 1,000 deliveries using these vehicles since August.

Enlarge / Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka) toasts friends and family at the witchy winter solstice in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina holiday special. (credit: Netflix)

Looking for a palate cleanser after all those wholesome Christmas movies saturating every TV channel? We recommend "A Midwinter's Tale," a special holiday episode of the Netflix horror series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. It caps off a strong first season for the fledgling series. And Sabrina has just been renewed for a third and fourth season (16 episodes in total), which means we'll get even more sinister witchy goodness in the future.

The series is based on the comic book series of the same name, part of the Archie Horror imprint, and it's much, much darker in tone than the original Sabrina the Teenaged Witch comics. Originally intended as a companion series to the CW's Riverdale—a gleefully Gothic take on the original Archie comic books—Sabrina ended up on Netflix instead. It's a stronger series for it, evidenced by rave reviews and a rapidly expanding fan base.

(Some spoilers for season 1 below.)

Enlarge (credit: FG/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)

A Southern California man has become the latest person to sue the federal government over what he says is an unconstitutional search of his phone at the Los Angeles International Airport.

According to his lawsuit, which was recently filed in federal court in Los Angeles, Haisam Elsharkawi had arrived at LAX on February 9, 2017 and was headed to Saudi Arabia to go on a hajj, the Muslim religious pilgrimage.

After clearing the security checkpoint, Elsharkawi, an American citizen, was pulled aside from the Turkish Airlines boarding line by a Customs and Border Protection officer, who began questioning him about how much cash he was carrying and where he was going. Elsharkawi complied with the officer’s inquiries and dutifully followed him to a nearby table.

Enlarge / SpaceX's first Starlink broadband satellites. (credit: Elon Musk)

SpaceX is raising $500 million from investors to help build its worldwide satellite broadband network, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

The company run by Elon Musk has agreed on financing terms with existing shareholders and new investor Baillie Gifford & Co., who will pay $186 per share for new stock, valuing the company at $30.5 billion, according to Journal sources. SpaceX hasn't received the money yet but could announce the deal by the end of December, the Journal reported.

The funding round would pay for initial costs but not the entire project, which the Journal report said could cost as much as $10 billion. We contacted SpaceX about the funding today but the company declined to comment.