Month: December 2024

Connected cars are great—at least until some company leaves unencrypted location data on the Internet for anyone to find. That's what happened with over 800,000 EVs manufactured by the Volkswagen Group, after Cariad, an automative software company that handles much of the development tasks for VW, left several terabytes of data unprotected on Amazon's cloud.

According to Motor1, a whistleblower gave German publication Der Spiegel and hacking collective Chaos Computer Club a heads-up about the misconfiguration. Der Spiegel and CCC then spent some time sifting through the data, with which allowed them to tie individual cars to their owners.

"The security hole allowed the publication to track the location of two German politicians with alarming precision, with the data placing a member of the German Defense Committee at his father’s retirement home and at the country’s military barracks," wrote Motor1.

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There is rarely time to write about every cool science paper that comes our way; many worthy candidates sadly fall through the cracks over the course of the year. But as 2024 comes to a close, we've gathered ten of our favorite such papers at the intersection of science and culture as a special treat, covering a broad range of topics: from reenacting Bronze Age spear combat and applying network theory to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, to Spider-Man inspired web-slinging tech and a mathematical connection between a turbulent phase transition and your morning cup of coffee. Enjoy!

Reenacting Bronze Age spear combat

An experiment with experienced fighters who spar freely using different styles. Credit: Valerio Gentile/CC BY

The European Bronze Age saw the rise of institutionalized warfare, evidenced by the many spearheads and similar weaponry archaeologists have unearthed. But how might these artifacts be used in actual combat? Dutch researchers decided to find out by constructing replicas of Bronze Age shields and spears and using them in realistic combat scenarios. They described their findings in an October paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

There have been a couple of prior experimental studies on bronze spears, but per Valerio Gentile (now at the University of Gottingen) and coauthors, practical research to date has been quite narrow in scope, focusing on throwing weapons against static shields. Coauthors C.J. van Dijk of the National Military Museum in the Netherlands and independent researcher O. Ter Mors each had more than a decade of experience teaching traditional martial arts, specializing in medieval polearms and one-handed weapons. So they were ideal candidates for testing the replica spears and shields.

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Durch die steigende Konkurrenz im KI-Geschäft möchte sich Nvidia als führende Plattform für Robotik-Lösungen platzieren. (Roboter, Nvidia)

We’d been chatting for the better part of two hours when Chris Kraft’s eyes suddenly brightened. “Hey,” he said, “Here’s a story I’ll bet you never heard.” Kraft, the man who had written flight rules for NASA at the dawn of US spaceflight and supervised the Apollo program, had invited me to his home south of Houston for one of our periodic talks about space policy and space history. As we sat in recliners upstairs, in a den overlooking the Bay Oaks Country Club, Kraft told me about a time the space shuttle almost got canceled.

It was the late 1970s, when Kraft directed the Johnson Space Center, the home of the space shuttle program. At the time, the winged vehicle had progressed deep into a development phase that started in 1971. Because the program had not received enough money to cover development costs, some aspects of the vehicle (such as its thermal protective tiles) were delayed into future budget cycles. In another budget trick, NASA committed $158 million in fiscal year 1979 funds for work done during the previous fiscal year.

This could not go on, and according to Kraft the situation boiled over during a 1978 meeting in a large conference floor on the 9th floor of Building 1, the Houston center’s headquarters. All the program managers and other center directors gathered there along with NASA’s top leadership. That meeting included Administrator Robert Frosch, a physicist President Carter had appointed a year earlier.

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Whether it’s braving the long line at a trendy new restaurant or hanging on just a few minutes longer to see if there’s a post-credits scene after a movie, the decision to persevere or ditch it depends on specific regions of our brains.

Waiting is not always about self-control. Deciding to wait (or not to wait) also involves gauging the value of the potential reward. In an experiment that investigated wait times among people with lesions in the frontal cortex of the brain, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Joe Kable and his research team found that subjects with damage to certain regions of the prefrontal cortex were less likely to wait things out.

“[Our] findings suggest that regions of the frontal cortex make computationally distinct contributions to adaptive persistence,” he and his team said in a study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

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Ein Tflops-Monster wird das eher nicht: Es gibt erste Details über die russische Antwort auf Playstation und Xbox. (Russland, Spielestreaming)

I'd describe myself as a skeptic of the generative AI revolution—I think the technology as it currently exists is situationally impressive and useful for specific kinds of tasks, but broadly oversold. I'm not sure it will vanish from relevance to quite the extent that other tech fads like the metaverse or NFTs did, but my suspicion is that companies like Nvidia and OpenAI are riding a bubble that will pop or deflate over time as more companies and individuals run up against the technology's limitations, and as it fails to advance as quickly or as impressively as its most ardent boosters are predicting.

Maybe you agree with me and maybe you don't! I'm not necessarily trying to convince you one way or the other. But I am here to say that even if you agree with me, we can all celebrate the one unambiguously positive thing that the generative AI hype cycle has done for computers this year: the RAM floor for many PCs and all Macs is now finally 16GB instead of 8GB.

Companies like Apple and Microsoft have, for years, created attractive, high-powered hardware with 8GB of memory in it, most egregiously in $1,000-and-up putative "pro" computers like last year's $1,599 M3 MacBook Pro or the Surface Pro 9.

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Ein Mann sieht sich in seinen Grundrechten benachteiligt, wenn er keinen Personalausweis ohne Speicherung der Fingerabdrücke erhält. Das Gericht entschied anders. (E-Personalausweis, Rechtsstreitigkeiten)

Im Umfeld von großen Rechenzentren könnten Haushalte häufiger von instabiler Stromversorgung betroffen sein. (Energie, Energiewende)

Eine Forschungsgruppe geht davon aus, dass die bisherigen Altersbestimmungen des Mondes inkorrekt sind. Der Erdtrabant soll 80 bis 180 Millionen Jahre älter sein. (Mond, Wissenschaft)