Month: November 2019

• 

  A rendering of what a Formula 1 race car will look like in 2021. [credit: FIA ]

On Sunday afternoon at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, Lewis Hamilton sealed his sixth Formula 1 world championship. Unquestionably one of the sport's greats, he wowed fans even during his debut with McLaren in 2007, winning his first title for that team the following year. The rest of his titles have come at the wheel of a Mercedes-AMG, and all since 2014.

The year 2014 happens to be when F1's last big rule change happened, ushering in the current era of complicated and expensive turbocharged hybrid V6es. During that time, the cars have gotten faster than ever before—even if they are approaching Le Mans prototypes in weight. They have also become even more ruinously expensive to design and operate, with little to no effect on the quality of the racing. But starting in 2021, that will change thanks to a new set of technical rules and more equitable sharing of the proceeds among the teams.

At least, that's what Liberty Media hopes. The US-based entertainment company bought the commercial rights to F1 in 2017, and since then it has been trying to fix some of the huge structural problems with the sport. That's easier said than done; a more equitable sharing of the pie means the well-funded, politically powerful teams will get less, and politically powerful turkeys rarely vote for Christmas. But that's what happened—the FIA World Motor Sport Council just voted unanimously to approve Liberty's intended changes, despite worries that Ferrari would exercise its veto.

Enlarge / Jackson Pollock working in his Long Island studio adjacent to his home in 1949. (credit: Martha Holmes/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Image)

Famed abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock notoriously relied on non-traditional painting techniques to create his masterpieces. Physicists have pondered the presence of curls and coils in his work, and whether the artist deliberately exploited a well-known fluid dynamics effect to achieve them. Now a recent paper in PLOS One is claiming the opposite: Pollock deliberately avoided so-called "coiling instabilities" as he worked.

For the last few years, Roberto Zenit, a physicist with the National Autonomous University of Mexico and Brown University, has been studying the physics of fluids at work in novel painting techniques like those used by Pollock and Mexican muralist David A. Siqueiros. Pollock, for instance, early on employed a "flying filament" or "flying catenary" technique before he perfected his dripping methods. The paint forms various viscous filaments, which are thrown against a vertical canvas. Zenit and several colleagues were able to recreate the fluid action by mounting a paint-filled brush on a rapidly rotating mechanical arm.

Pollock's dripping technique involved laying a canvas flat on the floor and then pouring paint on top of it. Sometimes he poured it directly from a can, sometimes he used a stick, knife, or brush, and sometimes he used a syringe. The artist usually "rhythmically" moved around the canvas as he worked. His style has long fascinated physicists, such as the controversy surrounding the question of whether or not Pollock's paintings show evidence of fractal patterns.

Enlarge (credit: Sugawara et al.)

Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are vulnerable to attacks that use lasers to inject inaudible—and sometimes invisible—commands into the devices and surreptitiously cause them to unlock doors, visit websites, and locate, unlock, and start vehicles, researchers report in a research paper published on Monday. Dubbed Light Commands, the attack works against Facebook Portal and a variety of phones.

Shining a low-powered laser into these voice-activated systems allows attackers to inject commands of their choice from as far away as 360 feet (110m). Because voice-controlled systems often don’t require users to authenticate themselves, the attack can frequently be carried out without the need of a password or PIN. Even when the systems require authentication for certain actions, it may be feasible to brute force the PIN, since many devices don’t limit the number of guesses a user can make. Among other things, light-based commands can be sent from one building to another and penetrate glass when a vulnerable device is kept near a closed window.

The attack exploits a vulnerability in microphones that use micro-electro-mechanical systems, or MEMS. The microscopic MEMS components of these microphones unintentionally respond to light as if it were sound. While the researchers tested only Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Facebook Portal, and a small number of tablets and phones, the researchers believe all devices that use MEMS microphones are susceptible to Light Commands attacks.

Enlarge / Ng "Blitzchung" Wai Chung declares his support for Hong Kong while two announcers duck behind their desks. (credit: Blizzard)

Blizzard President J. Allen Brack said in an interview with PC Gamer this weekend that the company will not be reversing a six-month suspension for Ng "Blitzchung" Wai Chung and two Hearthstone casters that were involved in Hong Kong-related protests on a live esports stream last month.

In explaining that decision,Brack reiterated the message that Blizzard supports free speech and encourages employees and players to say what they want in "all kinds of ways and all kinds of places." The one exception to that, he said, is "official broadcasts," including Blizzard-sponsored esports events, which the company wants to be "focused on the games."

"Again, it's not about the content of Blitzchung's message,"Brack said, echoing previous comments from Blizzard. "It's about the fact that it was not around the games. If we hadn't taken action, if we hadn't done something, you can imagine the trail that would be in our future around doing interviews. They would become times for people to make a statement about whatever they wanted to, on whatever issue. That's just a path that we don't want to go down. We really want the content of those official broadcasts to be focused on the games, and keep that focus."