Month: August 2023

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Our atmosphere holds six times more water than you’ll find in all the rivers on Earth. The dew drops you see on grass and water droplets on a cold juice bottle are evidence of this natural reservoir of water. Despite its ubiquity, 2 billion people on Earth still don’t have access to clean drinking water.

A technique called atmospheric water harvesting (AWH) can allow us to extract some of this freshwater out of the air. But there are various challenges that have prevented us from implementing AWH on a large scale. In order to create an effective and continuous AWH system, scientists need to ensure two things. The first is that the water absorption from the air is fully reversible so that the water can be retrieved for use.

The second is efficient waste heat management. When an AWH system captures water from the air, the condensation of water releases heat. If this excess heat is not processed carefully, it can interfere with the entire process. However, it seems that we are now closer to a solution. Inspired by the structure of plant leaves, a team of researchers in China has created a core-shell structural cellulose nanofiber-based aerogel (called Core-Shell@CNF for short) that promises to overcome these challenges.

Enlarge / A researcher connects a pedestal on a study volunteer's head to an external computer. The pedestal is wired to electrodes that rest on the surface of the brain. (credit: Noah Berger/UCSF)

Paralysis had robbed the two women of their ability to speak. For one, the cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a disease that affects the motor neurons. The other had suffered a stroke in her brain stem. Though they can’t enunciate clearly, they remember how to formulate words.

Now, after volunteering to receive brain implants, both are able to communicate through a computer at a speed approaching the tempo of normal conversation. By parsing the neural activity associated with the facial movements involved in talking, the devices decode their intended speech at a rate of 62 and 78 words per minute, respectively—several times faster than the previous record. Their cases are detailed in two papers published Wednesday by separate teams in the journal Nature.

“It is now possible to imagine a future where we can restore fluid conversation to someone with paralysis, enabling them to freely say whatever they want to say with an accuracy high enough to be understood reliably,” said Frank Willett, a research scientist at Stanford University’s Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory, during a media briefing on Tuesday. Willett is an author on a paper produced by Stanford researchers; the other was published by a team at UC San Francisco.

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In July, security researchers revealed a sobering discovery: hundreds of pieces of malware used by multiple hacker groups to infect Windows devices had been digitally signed and validated as safe by Microsoft itself. On Tuesday, a different set of researchers made a similarly solemn announcement: Microsoft’s digital keys had been hijacked to sign yet more malware for use by a previously unknown threat actor in a supply-chain attack that infected roughly 100 carefully selected victims.

The malware, researchers from Symantec’s Threat Hunter Team reported, was digitally signed with a certificate for use in what is alternatively known as the Microsoft Windows Hardware Developer Program and the Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Program. The program is used to certify that device drivers—the software that runs deep inside the Windows kernel—come from a known source and that they can be trusted to securely access the deepest and most sensitive recesses of the operating system. Without the certification, drivers are ineligible to run on Windows.

Hijacking keys to the kingdom

Somehow, members of this hacking team—which Symantec is calling Carderbee—managed to get Microsoft to digitally sign a type of malware known as a rootkit. Once installed, rootkits become what’s essentially an extension of the OS itself. To gain that level of access without tipping off end-point security systems and other defenses, the Carderbee hackers first needed its rootkit to receive the Microsoft seal of approval, which it got after Microsoft signed it.