Month: June 2024

Enlarge / An artist's concept of a Mars Ascent Vehicle orbiting the red planet. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA announced Friday that it will award contracts to seven companies, including SpaceX and Blue Origin, to study how to transport rock samples from Mars more cheaply back to Earth.

The space agency put out a call to industry in April to propose ideas on how to return the Mars rocks to Earth for less than $11 billion and before 2040, the cost and schedule for NASA's existing plan for Mars Sample Return (MSR). A NASA spokesperson told Ars the agency received 48 responses to the solicitation and selected seven companies to conduct more detailed studies.

Each company will receive up to $1.5 million for their 90-day studies. Five of the companies chosen by NASA are among the agency's roster of large contractors, and their inclusion in the study contracts is no surprise. Two other winners are smaller businesses.

Enlarge / A Diamond Shruumz chocolate bar, which come in a variety of flavors. (credit: diamondshruumz.com)

Various federal and state health officials are sounding the alarm on Diamond Shruumz-brand Microdosing Chocolate Bars. The candy, said to be infused with mushrooms, has been linked to severe illnesses, including seizures, loss of consciousness, confusion, sleepiness, agitation, abnormal heart rates, hyper/hypotension, nausea, and vomiting, according to an outbreak alert released by the Food and Drug Administration on Friday.

So far, eight people across four states have been sickened—four in Arizona, two in Indiana, one in Nevada, and one in Pennsylvania, the FDA reported. Of the eight, six have been hospitalized.

"We are urging the public to use extreme caution due to the very serious effects of these products," Maureen Roland, director of the Banner Poison and Drug Information Center in Phoenix, said in a press release earlier this week.

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A critical vulnerability in the PHP programming language can be trivially exploited to execute malicious code on Windows devices, security researchers warned as they urged those affected to take action before the weekend starts.

Within 24 hours of the vulnerability and accompanying patch being published, researchers from the nonprofit security organization Shadowserver reported Internet scans designed to identify servers that are susceptible to attacks. That—combined with (1) the ease of exploitation, (2) the availability of proof-of-concept attack code, (3) the severity of remotely executing code on vulnerable machines, and (4) the widely used XAMPP platform being vulnerable by default—has prompted security practitioners to urge admins check to see if their PHP servers are affected before starting the weekend.

When “Best Fit” isn't

“A nasty bug with a very simple exploit—perfect for a Friday afternoon,” researchers with security firm WatchTowr wrote.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan )

Google has achieved its goal of avoiding a jury trial in one antitrust case after sending a $2.3 million check to the US Department of Justice. Google will face a bench trial, a trial conducted by a judge without a jury, after a ruling today that the preemptive check is big enough to cover any damages that might have been awarded by a jury.

"I am satisfied that the cashier's check satisfies any damages claim," US District Judge Leonie Brinkema said after a hearing in the Eastern District of Virginia on Friday, according to Bloomberg. "A fair reading of the expert reports does not support" a higher amount, Brinkema said.

The check was reportedly for $2,289,751. "Because the damages are no longer part of the case, Brinkema ruled a jury is no longer needed and she will oversee the trial, set to begin in September," according to Bloomberg.

Enlarge / Precision’s Layer 7 Cortical Interface array. (credit: Precision)

Work toward brain-computer interfaces has never been more charged. Though neuroscientists have toiled for decades to tap directly into human thoughts, recent advances have the field buzzing with anticipation—and the involvement of one polarizing billionaire has drawn a new level of attention.

With competition amping up in this space, Ars spoke with Ben Rapoport, who is a neurosurgeon, electrical engineer, and co-founder of the brain-computer interface (BCI) company Precision Neuroscience. Precision is at the forefront of the field, having placed its BCI on the brains of 14 human patients so far, with two more scheduled this month. Rapoport says he hopes to at least double that number of human participants by the end of this year. In fact, the 3-year-old company expects to have its first BCI on the market next year.

In addition to the swift progress, Precision is notable for its divergence from its competitor's strategies, namely Neuralink, the most high-profile BCI company and headed by Elon Musk. In 2016, Rapoport co-founded Neuralink alongside Musk and other scientists. But he didn't stay long and went on to co-found Precision in 2021. In previous interviews, Rapoport suggested his split from Neuralink related to the issues of safety and invasiveness of the BCI design. While Neuralink's device is going deeper into the brain—trying to eavesdrop on neuron signals with electrodes at close range to decode thoughts and intended motions and speech—Precision is staying at the surface, where there is little to no risk of damaging brain tissue.

Enlarge / A slide-up screen is just one of the novel features for Adata's Steam Deck clone. (credit: RetroHandhelds)

For PC gamers used to the modular design of a desktop rig, there are pros and cons to the all-in-one, pre-fab design of the Steam Deck (and its many subsequent imitators in the growing handheld gaming PC market). On the one hand, you don't have to worry about pricing out individual parts and making sure they all work together. On the other hand, the only way to upgrade one of these devices is to essentially throw out the old unit and replace the entire thing, console-style.

Korean computer storage-maker Adata is looking to straddle these two extremes. Lilliputing reports on Adata's XPG Nia prototype, which was shown off at the Computex trade show. The unit is the first gaming handheld so far to embrace the CAMM (Compression Attached Memory Module) standard that allows for easily replaceable and upgradeable memory modules, as well as a number of other mod-friendly features.

CAMM on down

Samsung shared this rendering of a CAMM ahead of the publishing of the CAMM2 standard in September. (credit: Samsung)

If you've read our previous coverage of the emerging CAMM standard, you know how excited we are about the ultra-thin modules that can simply be screwed into place on a laptop or portable motherboard. That offers a viable replacement for the now-standard soldered LPDDR RAM, which saves space but is incredibly difficult to repair or replace.