Month: July 2021

A new wearable device turns the touch of a finger into a source of power for small electronics and sensors. (video link)

Wearables are so hot right now, with consumers scooping up more than 100 million units of smartwatches, fitness trackers, augmented reality glasses, and similar tech in the first quarter of 2021 alone. Sales in the category increased 34.4 percent in the second quarter from Q2 2020, making it one of the fastest-growing categories of personal electronics.

That rise comes with an increased demand for practical and efficient energy harvesters capable of continuously powering those wearables. Now, a team of engineers at the University of California San Diego has designed a new type of biofuel cell that harnesses energy from the sweat of your fingertips, according to a recent paper published in the journal Joule. It can also be integrated with piezoelectric generators to harvest energy from the pressing of the fingertip. The breakthrough could one day make it possible to power up your wearables as you type or sleep.

Enlarge / A potential Apple car or self-driving vehicle platform is still years away, but a key executive has shifted his focus to it. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Another executive shuffle is underway at Apple, according to Insider. Kevin Lynch, a key Apple VP overseeing health and the Apple Watch, is moving into a new role working on Project Titan, Apple's car project.

Lynch has been one of the most visible Apple leaders at WWDC and the company's various product unveiling events. He is one of the faces of Apple's health initiatives and the Apple Watch.

The report doesn't go into much detail about what Lynch will be doing on the car project. Recently, Apple's automotive product development has been led by the company's AI chief, John Giannandrea.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Microsoft hit yet another snag in its efforts to lock down the Windows print spooler, as the software maker warned customers on Thursday to disable the service to contain a new vulnerability that helps attackers execute malicious code on fully patched machines.

The vulnerability is the third printer-related flaw in Windows to come to light in the past five weeks. A patch Microsoft released in June for a remote code-execution flaw failed to fix a similar but distinct flaw dubbed PrintNightmare, which also made it possible for attackers to run malicious code on fully patched machines. Microsoft released an unscheduled patch for PrintNightmare, but the fix failed to prevent exploits on machines using certain configurations.

Bring your own printer driver

On Thursday, Microsoft warned of a new vulnerability in the Windows print spooler. The privilege-escalation flaw, tracked as CVE-2021-34481, allows hackers who already have the ability to run malicious code with limited system rights to elevate those rights. The elevation allows the code to access sensitive parts of Windows so malware can run each time a machine is rebooted.

Enlarge / Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Ala., is seen at NASA headquarters in 2019. (credit: NASA)

The US House Appropriations Committee passed a budget bill for NASA on Thursday, and it's generally good for the space agency. The legislation provides $25.04 billion, and it funds most of NASA's top spaceflight priorities, including the Artemis Moon program.

Notably, the bill appropriates $1.345 billion for a Human Landing System as part of the Artemis Program. And although some House members grumbled during hearings this week about NASA's decision in April to select SpaceX as the sole provider of the first demonstration landing, the legislation does not block NASA from moving forward with the contract.

As part of its plan to return humans to the Moon, NASA has sought to balance its reliance on traditional space contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin—generally favored by members of Congress due to their largesse in political donations and willingness to spread jobs across numerous districts—and new space companies such as SpaceX that deliver more bang for the buck while not playing as well with elected officials.

Enlarge / The exterior of the headquarters of biotechnology company Biogen in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (credit: Getty | Boston Globe)

Biogen's new Alzheimer's drug Aduhelm continues to face opposition after its contentious approval from the Food and Drug Administration last month—which the FDA now says should be independently investigated. Some insurers say they won't pay for the drug, some hospitals say they won't administer it, and yet more experts say it has no proven benefit and is dramatically overpriced at $56,000 for a year's supply.

On Thursday, a panel of medical experts convened by the nonprofit Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) voted 15-to-0 that there is no evidence that Aduhelm provides clinical benefit to patients. The unanimous vote echoes another one from a panel of expert advisors for the Food and Drug Administration who voted last November against FDA approval. Eleven of ten advisors voted that data collected in two identical Phase III clinical trials failed to show the drug is effective, with the remaining advisor voting "uncertain."

The FDA nevertheless approved the drug June 7, sparking a firestorm of criticism. In an unprecedented move last week, the FDA updated their recommendation for who should receive the drug, significantly narrowing the pool from all Alzheimer's patients to only those with mild disease. It's unusual for the FDA to make such a modification so soon after an initial decision and without fresh data to back a change.

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  Carrying case, which comes as part of the Steam Deck's pricier SKUs. [credit: Valve ]

Though Valve is fiercely protective of its PC game sales data, a rare HTML hole in its Steam service revealed apparently firm order numbers for the Steam Deck, the company's recently confirmed Switch-like portable gaming PC.

For the first 90 minutes of the system's preorder period earlier today—as limited to shoppers in North America, the UK, and the EU—Valve's database coughed up exact preorder numbers, thanks to "queue" metadata appearing in publicly viewable calls to the HTML version of Steam. During that time, SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik kept track of the sales tally, and by his count, the publicly reported queue for confirmed preorders exceeded 110,000 across those three sales regions.

Djundik's count was limited to Steam Deck's pricier SKUs, so the estimate doesn't account for sales of the cheapest, $399 version (which comes with 64GB of onboard storage). His count, as backed up by other users' image captures of sales data through the preorder period's first 90 minutes, boils down as follows: