Month: June 2023

It has been only a week since Nintendo removed a number of popular The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom item-duplication glitches with the release of the game's 1.1.2 update patch. But intrepid players have already found alternate methods for creating infinite items to build and fight to their heart's content.

The most straightforward (if slow) new method for item duplication, as described by Kibbles Gaming, involves fusing an item to a weapon, preparing to throw that weapon, and then watching previously viewed cutscenes via the "memories" section of the Adventure Log. Each memory you view apparently advances the game's logic by a single frame, letting you easily pinpoint the four-frame timing window where you can throw a weapon while also retaining a copy in your inventory. While this method is consistent and simple to perform (even early in the game), it can take quite a while to fill up your inventory this way.

A more efficient item duplication method requires you to purchase Link's House near Tarry Town in the east, then place a shock emitter item near the weapon display. With good timing, you can place a weapon on that display during the same frame that the shock emitter knocks it out of your hands, thus creating two copies of the weapon (and any fused item) instantly.

Enlarge / Computer-generated image of an early stage in embryonic development, before organ formation starts. (credit: KATERYNA KON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

Scientists set a new record for growing primate embryos outside the womb, as reported in the May issue of the journal Cell. For the first time, monkey embryos were cultivated in a lab for 25 days post-fertilization, achieving key developmental landmarks never before observed in culture, including the start of organ development. The ability to track these processes in the lab might be an important step toward understanding congenital birth defects and organ development in humans.

Understanding development

The early stages of animal development, often referred to as embryogenesis, encompass the transition from a seemingly unremarkable clump of cells to a complex and compartmentalized organism. At the conclusion of embryogenesis, cells have started the march toward specialization, and organ systems have begun to form. In mammals, this is a process that usually happens in the comfort and privacy of the uterus, making it difficult to observe, even with the advent of advanced imaging. And it’s difficult to experiment with factors that might influence development.

All of this has led developmental biologists to search for ways to get this process to occur in a culture dish, bypassing these limitations. Studying human embryogenesis is restricted due to ethical and legal considerations. While the specific guidelines may vary from country to country, the outcome is a nearly global prohibition on lab-maintained human embryos past 14 days—before the progenitor of the nervous system forms. This detail is of particular medical relevance, as irregularities during nervous system formation can result in a range of conditions affecting the spine, spinal cord, and brain, including spina bifida.

Enlarge / We don't know what this new SUV will look like or be called. The last big electric SUV concept the company showed was this bZ Large SUV in 2021. (credit: Toyota)

Toyota's factory in Georgetown, Kentucky, will get a bit of a glow-up. This week, the automaker confirmed that its factory in the Bluegrass State will assemble a new battery-electric vehicle starting in 2025. It will be an as-yet-unnamed three-row SUV, and the batteries for this new BEV will come from (somewhat) nearby North Carolina.

Toyota's Kentucky plant currently builds the powertrains and assembles the RAV4 hybrid, as well as sedans like the Camry and Lexus ES. It employs about 8,000 people to build more than half a million vehicles a year.

"Toyota Kentucky set the standard for Toyota vehicle manufacturing in the US, and now we’re leading the charge with BEVs," said Susan Elkington, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky. "Our incredible team of Kentuckians is excited to take on this new challenge while delivering the same great quality and reliability our customers expect."

Enlarge / Hurricane Irma as seen by satellite in 2019. (credit: NOAA)

Congratulations, everyone—we've made it to the startline of the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season.

Fasten your seatbelts because it could be a wild and bumpy ride. Or maybe not. Because when it comes to tropical activity, no one can be sure what will happen more than a few days into the future. And after about 10 or 12 days? Chaos theory rules, baby.

Not everyone needs to read this article, but many of you do. According to the US Census, more than 60 million Americans live in coastal areas vulnerable to tropical systems in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. For those residents, including yours truly, the threat of a tropical storm or hurricane lurks in the back of one's mind during the summer months like the dull pain of a past injury. The longer it has been since a nearby landfall, the more distant the hum. But it's there.

Enlarge (credit: BeeBright/Getty Images)

Hiding malicious programs in a computer’s UEFI firmware, the deep-seated code that tells a PC how to load its operating system, has become an insidious trick in the toolkit of stealthy hackers. But when a motherboard manufacturer installs its own hidden backdoor in the firmware of millions of computers—and doesn’t even put a proper lock on that hidden back entrance—they’re practically doing hackers’ work for them.

Researchers at firmware-focused cybersecurity company Eclypsium revealed today that they’ve discovered a hidden mechanism in the firmware of motherboards sold by the Taiwanese manufacturer Gigabyte, whose components are commonly used in gaming PCs and other high-performance computers. Whenever a computer with the affected Gigabyte motherboard restarts, Eclypsium found, code within the motherboard’s firmware invisibly initiates an updater program that runs on the computer and in turn downloads and executes another piece of software.

While Eclypsium says the hidden code is meant to be an innocuous tool to keep the motherboard’s firmware updated, researchers found that it’s implemented insecurely, potentially allowing the mechanism to be hijacked and used to install malware instead of Gigabyte’s intended program. And because the updater program is triggered from the computer’s firmware, outside its operating system, it’s tough for users to remove or even discover.

The final panel of the day at our Frontiers conference this year was hosted by me—though it was going to be tough to follow Benj's panel because I didn't have a cute intro planned. The topic we were covering was what might happen to developers when generative AI gets good enough to consistently create good code—and, fortunately, our panelists didn't think we had much to worry about. Not in the near term, at least.

Joined by Luta Security founder and CEO Katie Moussouris and Georgetown Senior Fellow Drew Lohn, the general consensus was that, although large language models can do some extremely impressive things, turning them loose to create production code is a terrible idea. While generative AI has indeed demonstrated the ability to create code, even cursory examination proves that today's large language models (LLMs) often do the same thing when coding that they do when spinning stories: they just make a whole bunch of stuff up. (The term of art here is "hallucination," but Ars AI expert Benj Edwards tends to prefer the term "confabulation" instead, as it more accurately reflects what it feels like the models are doing.)

So, while LLMs can be relied upon today to do simple things, like creating a regex, trusting them with your production code is way dicier.