Month: October 2020

Enlarge / Nine Merlin engines power the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. (credit: SpaceX)

NASA and SpaceX confirmed on Wednesday that they are targeting November 14 for the launch of the Crew-1 mission that will carry four astronauts to the International Space Station.

Originally scheduled to launch on Halloween, NASA delayed the launch after an engine issue aborted an October 2 launch attempt of a Falcon 9 rocket, at T-2 seconds, carrying a GPS III satellite for the US Air Force.

During a teleconference with reporters on Wednesday, SpaceX's Hans Koenigsmann explained what happened with the October 2 launch abort and what has been done to address the issue going forward.

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Researchers have extracted the secret key that encrypts updates to an assortment of Intel CPUs, a feat that could have wide-ranging consequences for the way the chips are used and, possibly, the way they’re secured.

The key makes it possible to decrypt the microcode updates Intel provides to fix security vulnerabilities and other types of bugs. Having a decrypted copy of an update may allow hackers to reverse engineer it and learn precisely how to exploit the hole it’s patching. The key may also allow parties other than Intel—say a malicious hacker or a hobbyist—to update chips with their own microcode, although that customized version wouldn’t survive a reboot.

“At the moment, it is quite difficult to assess the security impact,” independent researcher Maxim Goryachy said in a direct message. “But in any case, this is the first time in the history of Intel processors when you can execute your microcode inside and analyze the updates.” Goryachy and two other researchers—Dmitry Sklyarov and Mark Ermolov, both with security firm Positive Technologies—worked jointly on the project.

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  Goodbye, Google Music. Flower emojis are welcome and may be placed in the comment section below. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Google Play Music died last week. We've known this was coming for some time, and nothing ever happens across the entire Google user base all at once, but many bereaved Google customers are reporting a total loss of life for Google Music. For me the store is gone, speakers no longer work, the app is dead, and the website is dead. It's all gone.

The shutdown wave seems to be rolling across the Google Music userbase as you read this, and even if you still personally have access to some parts the service, you probably won't have much time left to say your goodbyes. Google Music, born May 10, 2011, will leave us after nine wonderful years.

The service will now join Reader, Google+, and countless other products in the great Google graveyard in the sky. Covering the Google news beat in this day and age basically means running a full-time funeral parlor, and just as we did for the death of Google Inbox, we're here to peacefully guide Google Music into the afterlife with a proper send-off. Thank you for being here today as we celebrate the life of Google's trailblazing music service.

Enlarge / A building in a Ndebele village, South Africa. The Ndebele-language speakers, currently about a million strong, arrived in South Africa with the Bantu expansion. (credit: DEA / S. VANNINI / Getty Images)

Humanity originated in Africa, and it remained there for tens of thousands of years. To understand our shared genetic history, it's inevitable that we have to look to Africa. Unlike elsewhere on the planet, however, African populations were present throughout our history—they weren't subject to the same sorts of founder effects seen as populations expanded into unoccupied areas. Instead, those populations were scrambled as groups migrated to new areas within the continent.

Sorting out all of this would be a challenge, but it's one that has been made harder by the fact that most genome data comes from people in the industrialized world, leaving the vast populations of Africa poorly sampled. That's starting to change, and a new paper reports on the efforts of a group that has just analyzed over 400 African genomes, many coming from populations that have never participated in genome studies before.

New diversity

New genetic variants arise all the time. As a result, the oldest populations—those in Africa—should have the most novel variations. But identifying these populations can be hard when there are so many; the study mentions that there are over 2,000 ethnolinguistic groups in sub-Saharan Africa, and only a small number of those have been sampled. The new study is a huge step forward, with over 400 complete genome sequences from geographically dispersed populations. But even there, it's limited, adding only 50 new ethnolinguistic groups and two vast regions of the continent represented by people from a single country (Zambia for Central Africa and Botswana for Southern Africa).

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  AMD CEO Lisa Su holds the Radeon RX 6900 XT. [credit: AMD ]

Today, AMD launched the first of its "Big Navi" RDNA 2 architecture Radeon graphics cards, the RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT. These cards compete directly against Nvidia's RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090.

Like Nvidia's RTX 3000 line, the new cards offer 60+ fps 4K gaming, with full DirectX 12 Ultimate support, including hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing.

Performance

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  Big Navi offers huge generation-on-generation gains... much like Nvidia's RTX 3000 series did, versus its RTX 2000 series. [credit: AMD ]

RDNA2 brought enormous gen-on-gen fps gains from last generation's "little Navi" RX 5000 series—but what most people will care about is how the components compare to Nvidia's offerings, not to last generation's AMD. In terms of sheer GPU horsepower, Nvidia's RTX 3000 series and AMD's RX 6000 series appear to be in a dead heat. As always, it's worth taking a vendor's own private benchmarks with a grain of salt—but we don't expect to see materially different results in private testing later as these cards filter down to the market.