Month: June 2019

Enlarge / A Tesla Motors Inc. Model S electric automobile sits connected to a charger inside a Tesla store in Munich, Germany, on Monday, March 30, 2015. (credit: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

According to a report today from CNBC, Tesla is working on research and development of battery cells in a lab near its manufacturing facility in Fremont, Calif. Five anonymous current and former employees said the R&D is focused on "designing and prototyping advanced lithium-ion battery cells," as well as systems that could help the company produce cells at high volume.

Currently, Tesla has a partnership with Panasonic to make the battery cells it uses in its cars and stationary batteries. That relationship extends out to Tesla's Buffalo, NY-based solar panel factory, which Tesla also co-owns with Panasonic. But recently, the fraternity between the two companies seems to be wearing thin.

In September of last year, a Panasonic executive said that the bottleneck for Model 3 production had been the speed at which Panasonic could manufacture battery cells. In October 2018, Panasonic reported that it lost $65 million to the part of its business that makes battery cells for Tesla's vehicles. In April 2019, the Nikkei Asian Review reported that Panasonic would not make additional investments into Tesla's Gigafactory beyond what it had already committed to. Tesla's recent purchase of Maxwell Technologies, which makes automotive- and utility-grade battery components, may also have driven a wedge between the companies.

Enlarge / Apple's iPad Pro had a new, Apple-designed chip called the A12X that rivaled many high-end laptop CPUs in performance. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple has hired an experienced CPU designer to join its team. Mike Filippo joined Apple last month with the title Architect, according to his LinkedIn profile. The move ends a decade spent at ARM, where he was lead architect on several chip products. Filippo also spent time working on CPUs at Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

The hire is a big get for Apple. ARM is responsible for technology that powers the A series chips Apple has been using in its mobile devices. For instance, the A12X in the iPad Pro springboards off the big.LITTLE architecture from ARM.

"Mike was a long-time valuable member of the ARM community," a representative from ARM told Bloomberg. "We appreciate all of his efforts and wish him well in his next endeavor." Apple has not commented on the hire.

Enlarge / Iran's hacking groups are scaling up, hitting Saudi companies and other organizations, according to a Recorded Future report. (credit: Getty Images)

A new report from the threat research firm Recorded Future finds that activity from APT33—the Iranian "threat group" previously tied to the Shamoon wiper attack and other Iranian cyber-espionage and destructive malware attacks—has risen dramatically, with the organization creating over 1,200 domains for use in controlling and spreading malware. The research, conducted by Recorded Future's Insikt Group threat intelligence service, found with some confidence that individuals tied to APT33 (also known as "Elfin") had launched attacks on multiple Saudi companies, including two healthcare organizations—as well as an Indian media company and a "delegation from a diplomatic institution."

The majority of these attacks have involved "commodity" malware—well-known remote access tools (RATs).  According to the report:

APT33, or a closely aligned threat actor, continues to control C2 domains in bulk. Over 1,200 domains have been in use since March 28, 2019, alone. Seven hundred twenty-eight of these were identified communicating with infected hosts. Five hundred seventy-five of the 728 domains were observed communicating with hosts infected by one of 19 mostly publicly available RATs. Almost 60% of the suspected APT33 domains that were classified to malware families related to njRAT infections, a RAT not previously associated with APT33 activity. Other commodity RAT malware families, such as AdwindRAT and RevengeRAT, were also linked to suspected APT33 domain activity.

After Symantec revealed much of the infrastructure used by APT33 in March, the Iranian group parked a majority of its existing domains and registered over 1,200 new ones, with only a few remaining active. In addition to the collection of RATs, about a quarter of the domains are tied to unknown activity—and a half-percent are connected to StoneDrill, the upgraded Shamoon wiper first seen in 2017.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Peter Dazeley)

Verizon yesterday received the government's permission to lock handsets to its network for 60 days after each device's activation, despite open-access rules that apply to one of Verizon's key spectrum licenses.

The Federal Communications Commission waiver approval said 60-day locks will "allow Verizon to better combat identity theft and other forms of handset-related fraud."

Verizon generally sells its phones unlocked, meaning they can be used on any carrier's network as long as the device and network are compatible with each other. This is largely because of rules the FCC applied to 700MHz spectrum that Verizon bought at auction in 2008. The 700MHz spectrum rules say that a license holder may not "disable features on handsets it provides to customers... nor configure handsets it provides to prohibit use of such handsets on other providers' networks."

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  F1 2019 has arrived a few months earlier than F1 games in years past. I think there are enough meaningful improvements to warrant a purchase. [credit: Codemasters ]

Coming up with something new to say about the annual update to a franchised sports game is probably almost as hard as being one of the developers who has to come up with something new to put in the game. Which is my inelegant way of saying that Codemasters' newest Formula 1 racing game, F1 2019, is here.

I don't envy the job of Lee Mather and his team at Codemasters. F1 2017 was a great racing game. F1 2018 was an extremely great racing game—and a wonderful interactive textbook focused on the evolution of Formula 1 cars from the early 1970s through today (as good a sequel to LJK Setright's excellent The Grand Prix Car, 1954-1966 as we're ever likely to see, but in video game form). Happily, F1 2019 is no turkey, adding enough that's new to make the game a worthwhile upgrade for the F1 fan.

The most immediately noticeable change is the inclusion of Formula 2. This, as the name suggests, is the feeder series into F1—the sport's version of baseball's farm teams or college football and basketball. As you fire up the game for the first time and start your career mode, you'll be faced with a series of different challenges as a young F2 driver hoping to move up to the big show. How you perform in these—working as a team player, dealing with a noxious rival, coping with adversity during a race—all influences the RPG elements of the game, which were first introduced in last year's installment.

Enlarge / The RoboBee X­Wing without its power and electronics. (credit: Noah T. Jafferis and E. Farrell Helbling, Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory)

Just over six years ago, when researchers at Harvard announced that they had made tiny flying robots, they immediately began talking about the prospect of their tiny creations operating autonomously in complicated environments. That seemed wildly optimistic, given that the robots flew by trailing a set of copper wires that brought power and control instructions; the robots were guided by a computer that monitored their positions using a camera.

Since then, however, the team has continued working on refining the tiny machines, giving them enhanced landing capabilities, for example. And today, the team is announcing the first demonstration of self-powered flight. The flight is very short and isn't self-controlled, but the tiny craft manages to carry both the power supply circuitry and its own power source.

A matter of miniaturization

There are two approaches to miniaturization, which you can think of as top-down and bottom-up. From the top-down side, companies are shrinking components and cutting weight to allow ever smaller versions of quadcopter drones to fly, with some now available that weigh as little as 10 grams. But this type of hardware faces some hard physical limits that are going to limit how much it could shrink. Batteries, for example, end up with more of their mass going to packaging and support hardware rather than charge storage. And friction begins to play a dominant role in the performance of the standard rotating motors.

Enlarge / This could all be 25% more expensive if the Trump administration's latest Chinese tariff threats go through.

With the long-running trade war between the United States and China continuing to escalate, the Trump administration is now threatening to institute a 25% tariff on an additional $300 billion in goods from the country, a move that would cover almost all Chinese exports. In light of that threat, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony issued a letter today asking the administration to exempt video game consoles from any such tariff plans.

The seven-page letter, signed by the business affairs VPs of the three major console makers, argues that any tax on game console imports would "injure consumers, video game developers, retailers, and console manufacturers; put thousands of high-value, rewarding U.S. jobs at risk; and stifle innovation in our industry and beyond."

Since game consoles are sold at or slightly above the cost of manufacture, the cost of any import tariff would have to be passed directly on to "extremely price sensitive" consumers, the letter argues. "A price increase of 25% will likely put a new video game console out of reach for many American families who we expect to be in the market for a console this holiday season," the letter says.

Nearly seven years ago, MIT scientists mapped the molecular structure of proteins in spider silk threads onto musical theory to produce the "sound" of silk in hopes of establishing a radical new way to create designer proteins. That work even inspired a sonification art exhibit, "Spider's Canvas," in Tokyo last fall. Artist Tomas Saraceno created an interactive instrument inspired by the web of a Cyrotophora citricola spider, with each strand in the "web" tuned to a different note.

Now MIT materials engineer Markus Buehler and his colleagues are back with an even more advanced system of making music out of a protein structure—and then converting it back to create novel proteins never before seen in nature. The team also developed a free app for the Android smartphone, called the Amino Acid Synthesizer, so users could create their own protein "compositions" from the sounds of amino acids. They described their work in a new paper in ACS Nano.

Much like how music has a limited number of notes and chords and uses different combinations to compose music, proteins have a limited number of building blocks (its 20 amino acids) which can combine in any number of ways to create novel protein structures with unique properties. Furthermore, "Any genre of music has patterns," said Buehler. "You'll see universality in terms of sound, the tones, but you also see repetitive patterns, like motifs and movements in classical music. These kinds of patterns are also found in proteins."