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Lee Hutchinson

Oh hey, look, it's Adam Savage.

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When we met Adam Savage on a Friday evening, the Mythbusters co-host was jazzed after spending much of the day at Johnson Space Center, where he got to hang out with engineers and technicians in the robotics and advanced space suit labs. Savage was visiting Houston to promote his new exhibit—The Explosive Exhibition—at Space Center Houston. But during his interview with Ars, he was just as happy to talk space. “This is totally a thing for me,” he explained, doffing his fedora.

Savage spent 14 years building and destroying stuff on the hit TV show Mythbusters. He was driven from an early age to work with his hands and explore the boundaries of human experience by testing, failing, and trying again. In this he feels some kinship with NASA, which he characterized as “a ritualized failure analysis organization.” Both Mythbusters and the space agency, he said, try to game out all of the ways in which something can fail to ensure overall safety.

“It feels very simpatico to me because when I look at NASA hardware I can tell that people built it,” Savage said. “That’s different from when I sit in a modern car. Most modern stuff is made by robots and machines. But there is a tactile element of NASA hardware that is super evocative. I wasn’t obsessed with NASA until I met NASA scientists making Mythbusters, and I realized they were treating me like a peer.” The TV show has visited NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California numerous times to use the facility’s wind tunnels and its iconic Hangar One facility. They were welcomed with open arms.

Surface 3 in its docking station. (credit: Microsoft)

The new system is supposed to contain Intel's next generation Kaby Lake processor, which is itself shrouded in mystery. Intel has been awfully quiet about Kaby Lake, and while leaked slides originally spoke of it as a Q3 2016 product, it might slip into 2017. This is an issue not just for Microsoft's rumored all-in-one, but also the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, both of which are awaiting Kaby Lake's release before being refreshed.

Nothing else is known about the new Surface, but expect it to aim for the high end of the market and share the premium build of its predecessors. Unlike other Surface products, however, the all-in-one PC space has already been trod by Dell, Lenovo, HP, Apple, and others. Surface (and in particular Surface Pro 3) arguably defined a new category of two-in-one tablet-laptop hybrids, and Surface Book's detachable screen and GPU base added novel twists to the clamshell laptop. If the all-in-one Surface does not similarly push the market in a new direction and instead merely treads on the toes of Microsoft's OEM partners, expect a lot more grumbling of the kind that met the original Surface's announcement.

(credit: Abraxas3d)

Topping the list of predatory business schemes, direct-to-consumer clinics peddling unproven stem cell therapies may be right up there with payday loans and Shkreli-esque drug pricing. Such clinics can tout dangerous, often exorbitantly priced “treatments.” They frequently target the vulnerable and desperate, including terminal cancer patients, parents of autistic children, and grown children of parents with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. And the results can range from placebos to bones in eyelids and scary growths on spinal cords.

We tend to think this kind of quackery only thrives in countries with lax regulations like China, India, or Mexico. The phrase “stem cell tourism” usually evokes a plane trip. But stem cell therapies are unexpectedly flourishing in the US and may only require a short car trip.

In an analysis published this week in Cell Stem Cell, researchers identified a startling 351 businesses, encompassing 570 clinics across the US, that offer stem cell therapies largely unproven and unapproved by the Food and Drug Administration. Without peer-reviewed evidence, these businesses and clinics claim their therapies can treat dozens of diseases, injuries, and cosmetic indications, including joint pain, autism, spinal cord injuries, muscular dystrophy, and breast augmentation. Costs can reach into tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for treatments.

Michelle Carter at a court hearing in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, last year. (credit: WPRI12)

Massachusetts' top court ruled Friday that a teenager may stand trial on involuntary manslaughter charges in connection to text messages she sent urging her friend to commit suicide.

In a unanimous ruling, the Supreme Judicial Court said a local grand jury had enough probable cause to indict Michelle Carter in connection to the 2014 suicide of Carter Roy III, who was found dead about 50 miles south of Boston in a Fairhaven parking lot. The girl was 17 at the time of Roy's suicide, and she is accused of sending Roy several texts, including one saying "get back in" the day the 18-year-old teen took his own life via carbon monoxide fumes inside his truck.

The defendant's lawyers maintained that her texts were constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment. The court, however, did not create a bright line rule on where free speech ends and criminality begins. Instead, the court ruled that a physical act of violence is not necessary to sustain involuntary manslaughter charges and that each case is "entirely fact specific."

Privacy advocates take note: Android's full-disk encryption just got dramatically easier to defeat on devices that use chips from semiconductor maker Qualcomm, thanks to new research that reveals several methods to extract crypto keys off of a locked handset. Those methods include publicly available attack code that works against an estimated 37 percent of enterprise users.

A blog post published Thursday revealed that in stark contrast to the iPhone's iOS, Qualcomm-powered Android devices store the disk encryption keys in software. That leaves the keys vulnerable to a variety of attacks that can pull a key off a device. From there, the key can be loaded onto a server cluster, field-programmable gate array, or supercomputer that has been optimized for super-fast password cracking.

The independent researcher that published the post included exploit code that extracts the disk encryption keys by exploiting two vulnerabilities in TrustZone. TrustZone is a collection of security features within the ARM processors Qualcomm sells to handset manufacturers. By stitching together the exploits, the attack code is able to execute code within the TrustZone kernel, which is an enclave dedicated for sensitive operations such as managing cryptographic keys and protecting hardware.