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upstart writes:

Multiple BusyBox Security Bugs Threaten Embedded Linux Devices:

Researchers have discovered 14 critical vulnerabilities in a popular program used in embedded Linux applications, all of which allow for denial of service (DoS) and 10 that also enable remote code execution (RCE), they said.

One of the flaws also could allow devices to leak info, according to researchers from JFrog Security and Claroty Research, in a report shared with Threatpost on Tuesday.

The two firms teamed up to take a deeper dive into BusyBox, a software suite used by many of the world's leading operational technology (OT) and internet of things (IoT) devices—such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs), human-machine interfaces (HMIs) and remote terminal units (RTUs). Shachar Menashe, senior director security research for JFrog, partnered with Vera Mens, Uri Katz, Tal Keren and Sharon Brizinov of Claroty Research on the report.

Touted as a "Swiss Army Knife" of embedded Linux, BusyBox is comprised of useful Unix utilities called applets that are packaged as a single executable. The program includes a full-fledged shell, a DHCP client/server, and small utilities such as cp, ls, grep and others.

The discovery of the flaws are significant because of the proliferation of BusyBox not just for the embedded Linux world, but also for numerous Linux applications outside of devices, Menashe said in an email to Threatpost.

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upstart writes:

Once mighty conglomerate GE to split into three units:

General Electric Co. will split into three separate companies, breaking up the once-mighty conglomerate into standalone businesses focused on health care, power and aviation. The shares surged.

The health unit will be spun off in early 2023, according to a statement Tuesday. GE will combine its renewable energy, power equipment and digital businesses into a separate unit that will then be spun off in early 2024. The remaining company will consist of GE Aviation, the company's engine-manufacturing operation.

The move ends years of speculation about the future of GE, long one of the most admired U.S. companies but one that's struggled since the global financial crisis more than a decade ago. Since then it's been retrenching from its once sprawling conglomerate structure, including the sale of the bulk of the GE Capital finance arm.

[...] With operational improvements to boost cash flow and profit margins, GE is on target to have reduced its debt burden by more than $75 billion over three years by the end of 2021, the company said. There are opportunities for further progress, it said in an investor presentation.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Samsung Announces LPDDR5X DRAM for Smartphones; 1.3x Faster Than LPDDR5 With Speeds up to 8.5Gbps

Samsung today officially announced LPDDR5X DRAM chips for smartphones and other applications. Compared to the LPDDR5 standard, the new chips bring increased speeds, and it will be no surprise that we will see them in action in several 2022 flagship handsets.

[...] In contrast to LPDDR5's 6.4Gbps maximum bandwidth, LPDDR5X can achieve 1.3-times the performance with processing speeds that go up to 8.5Gbps. Samsung has used its 14nm technology to mass produce the next-generation DRAM chips, and it will be advantageous for portable devices too because the new standard is 20 percent more energy-efficient than LPDDR5.

The press release says that 16Gb LPDDR5X chips will enable 64 GB memory packages, "accommodating increasing demand for higher-capacity mobile DRAM worldwide." In other words, Samsung is planning to put 32 dies in a single package, and eventually stick 64 gigabytes of memory in smartphones (or tablets, or laptops). Recently, Samsung has been making 16 GB packages with only 12 or 8 dies:

The 16Gb LPDDR5 can build a 16GB package with only eight chips, whereas its 1y-based predecessor requires 12 chips (eight 12Gb chips and four 8Gb chips) to provide the same capacity.

Also at AnandTech.

Previously: SK Hynix Announces 8 GB LPDDR4x DRAM Package for Mobile Devices
Samsung Announces LPDDR5 DRAM Prototype Before Specification is Finalized
Samsung Announces Mass Production of 16 GB LPDDR5 DRAM Packages
SK Hynix Begins Production of 18 GB LPDDR5 Memory... for Smartphones

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Bedtime linked with heart health:

Going to sleep between 10:00 and 11:00 pm is associated with a lower risk of developing heart disease compared to earlier or later bedtimes, according to a study published today in European Heart Journal – Digital Health, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1

"The body has a 24-hour internal clock, called circadian rhythm, that helps regulate physical and mental functioning," said study author Dr. David Plans of the University of Exeter, UK. "While we cannot conclude causation from our study, the results suggest that early or late bedtimes may be more likely to disrupt the body clock, with adverse consequences for cardiovascular health."

While numerous analyses have investigated the link between sleep duration and cardiovascular disease, the relationship between sleep timing and heart disease is underexplored. This study examined the association between objectively measured, rather than self-reported, sleep onset in a large sample of adults.

DannyB writes:

Ferocious 'penis worms' were the hermit crabs of the ancient seas:

[...] Technically known as priapulids — named for Priapus, the well-endowed Greek god of male genitals — penis worms, as they're commonly known, are a division of marine worms that have survived in the world's oceans for 500 million years. Their modern descendants live largely unseen in muddy burrows deep underwater, occasionally freaking out fishermen with their floppy, phallus-shaped bodies. But fossils dating back to the early Cambrian show that penis worms were once a scourge of the ancient seas, widely distributed around the world and in possession of extendible, fang-lined mouths that could make a snack out of the poor marine creature that crossed them.

But, fearsome as they were, penis worms themselves were not without fear. In a new study published Nov. 7 in the journal Current Biology, researchers discovered four priapulid fossils that were nestled into the cone-shaped shells of hyoliths, a long-extinct group of marine animals.

[...] In each shell, the worm's bottom sits squished into the bottom of the cone, while the worm's head and mouth dangle out over the side — sort of like a melting swirl of soft-serve ice cream. According to the researchers, the fossil region contained dozens of other empty shells, but no other free-living priapulids, suggesting the connection between the two was no mere accident. Furthermore, each worm fit snugly in its sheath, suggesting the creatures chose their shells for permanent protection from Cambrian predators, rather than as temporary refuge.

Penis worms were the hermit crabs of their time:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The 2020 Decadal Survey for Astronomy and Astrophysics has recommended a new series of three Great Observatories — or space-based telescopes — as a top national priority for the future of space astrophysics.

The Lynx X-Ray Observatory is included as part of this vision. Dozens of scientists and engineers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian teamed with colleagues around the world to define the observatory’s scientific objectives, conceptualize its design and work on key technologies.

Known as the Decadal Survey, the report evaluates astrophysics and astronomy programs and prioritizes them for the next decade of transformative science. Findings from the survey are submitted as recommendations to NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy to guide funding requests and allocations for astrophysics over the next 10 years.

[...] “Lynx will reveal invisible drivers of the cosmos,” says Grant Tremblay an astronomer at the CfA and member of the Lynx concept study team. “It will act as an indispensable force-multiplier for a triad of Observatories that will be greater together than they ever could be apart.”

Original Submission

takyon writes:

AMD has announced its "Milan-X" Epyc CPUs, which reuse the same Zen 3 chiplets found in "Milan" Epyc CPUs with up to 64 cores, but with triple the L3 cache using stacked "3D V-Cache" technology designed in partnership with TSMC. This means that some Epyc CPUs will go from having 256 MiB of L3 cache to a whopping 768 MiB (804 MiB of cache when including L1 and L2 cache). 2-socket servers using Milan-X can have over 1.5 gigabytes of L3 cache. The huge amount of additional cache results in average performance gains in "targeted workloads" of around 50% according to AMD. Microsoft found an 80% improvement in some workloads (e.g. computational fluid dynamics) due to the increase in effective memory bandwidth.

AMD's next-generation of Instinct high-performance computing GPUs will use a multi-chip module (MCM) design, essentially chiplets for GPUs. The Instinct MI250X includes two "CDNA 2" dies for a total of 220 compute units, compared to 120 compute units for the previous MI100 monolithic GPU. Performance is roughly doubled (FP32 Vector/Matrix, FP16 Matrix, INT8 Matrix), quadrupled (FP64 Vector), or octupled (FP64 Matrix). VRAM has been quadrupled to 128 GB of High Bandwidth Memory. Power consumption of the world's first MCM GPU will be high, as it has a 560 Watt TDP.

The Frontier exascale supercomputer will use both Epyc CPUs and Instinct MI200 GPUs.

AMD officially confirmed that upcoming Zen 4 "Genoa" Epyc CPUs made on a TSMC "5nm" node will have up to 96 cores. AMD also announced "Bergamo", a 128-core "Zen 4c" Epyc variant, with the 'c' indicating "cloud-optimized". This is a denser, more power-efficient version of Zen 4 with a smaller cache. According to a recent leak, Zen 4c chiplets will have 16 cores instead of 8, will retain hyperthreading, and will be used in future Zen 5 Ryzen desktop CPUs as AMD's answer to Intel's Alder Lake heterogeneous ("big.LITTLE") x86 microarchitecture.

Also at Tom's Hardware (Milan-X).

Previously: AMD Reveals 'Instinct' for Machine Intelligence
AMD Launches "Milan" Epyc Server CPUs, with Zen 3 and up to 64 Cores
AMD at Computex 2021: 5000G APUs, 6000M Mobile GPUs, FidelityFX Super Resolution, and 3D Chiplets
AMD Unveils New Ryzen V-Cache Details at HotChips 33
AMD Aims to Increase Energy Efficiency of Epyc CPUs and Instinct AI Accelerators 30x by 2025

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Drinking linked to a decline in brain health from cradle to grave: Harm prevention policies must take the long view, say experts:

Writing in The BMJ today, researchers in Australia and the UK say evidence suggests three periods of dynamic brain changes that may be particularly sensitive to the harmful effects of alcohol: gestation (from conception to birth), later adolescence (15-19 years), and older adulthood (over 65 years).

They warn that these key periods "could increase sensitivity to the effects of environmental exposures such as alcohol" and say harm prevention policies "must take the long view."

Globally, around 10% of pregnant women consume alcohol, with the rates considerably higher in European countries than the global average, they write.

Heavy alcohol use during pregnancy can cause fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, associated with widespread reductions in brain volume and cognitive impairment. But data suggest that even low or moderate alcohol consumption during pregnancy is significantly associated with poorer psychological and behavioural outcomes in offspring.

upstart writes:

New glue sticks easily, holds strongly, and is a gas to pull apart: Research expands number of temporary adhesives:

Dartmouth research has discovered a class of molecular materials that can be used to make temporary adhesives that don't require force for removal. These non-permanent glues won't be available as home or office supplies, but they can lead to new manufacturing techniques and pharmaceutical design.

"This temporary adhesive works in an entirely different way than other adhesives," said Katherine Mirica, an assistant professor of chemistry at Dartmouth. "This innovation will unlock new manufacturing strategies where on-demand release from adhesion is required."

The Dartmouth research focuses on molecular solids, a special class of adhesive materials that exist as crystals. The molecules in the structures are sublimable, meaning that they shift directly from a solid to a gas without passing through a liquid phase.

JoeMerchant writes:

Quantum Brilliance was founded in 2019 on the back of research undertaken by its founders at the Australian National University, where they developed techniques to manufacture, scale and control qubits embedded in synthetic diamond.

The company has already built a number of "Quantum development kits" in rack units, each with around 5 qubits to work with, and it's placing them with customers already, for benchmarking, integration, co-design opportunities and to let companies start working out where they'll be advantageous once they hit the market in a ~50-qubit "Quantum Accelerator" product form by around 2025. "We think over a decade," says Luo, "we can even produce a quantum system-on-a-chip for mobile devices. Because this is truly material science technology that can achieve that." From their whitepaper, the technical description of their technique is:

Room-temperature diamond quantum computers consist of an array of processor nodes. Each processor node is comprised of a nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center (a defect in the diamond lattice consisting of a substitutional nitrogen atom adjacent to a vacancy) and a cluster of nuclear spins: the intrinsic nitrogen nuclear spin and up to ~4 nearby 13C nuclear spin impurities. The nuclear spins act as the qubits of the computer, whilst the NV centers act as quantum buses that mediate the initialization and readout of the qubits, and intra-and inter-node multi-qubit operations. Quantum computation is controlled via radiofrequency, microwave, optical and magnetic fields.

"In terms of commercial deployment," says Luo, "we have the Pawsey Supercomupting Center, which is currently the Southern Hemisphere's largest supercomputing center, co-owned by CSIRO and some other universities. We established basically Australia's first supercompuing quantum innovation hub, and we set up a Pawsey Pioneer program where industry and research groups can utilize our quantum operating system.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/07/1053383188/a-broken-toilet-on-spacex-capsule-means-astronauts-will-return-to-earth-in-diape

The journey back to Earth from space is never easy, but the astronauts aboard the SpaceX capsule coming home Monday will have an extra challenge to deal with: no working toilet. The four members on SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavor will be wearing diapers as they splash down, in order to prevent anything else from splashing too.

[...] In this weekend's press conference, NASA astronaut Megan McArthur confirmed that the toilets on board Dragon Endeavor are broken. "Of course that's sub-optimal, but we're prepared to manage," she said with a smile. "Space flight is full of lots of little challenges, this is just one more that we'll encounter and take care of in our mission."

[...] NASA and SpaceX engineers say they did extensive tests to make sure that the urine leak from April, when the crew was last in the Dragon capsule, would not have harmed the spacecraft over time.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Treating diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's is a challenge because drugs have to be able to cross the blood–brain barrier. As a result, the doses administered must be high and only a small fraction reaches the brain, which can lead to significant systemic side effects.  To solve this issue, the postdoctoral researcher Jean-Michel Rabanel, under the supervison of Professor Charles Ramassamy, at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (NRS), is optimizing polymer-coated nanoparticles to increase their permeability across this barrier and consequently the delivery of encapsulated drugs in the brain.

In their recent study, the team demonstrated the effectiveness of a specific polymer with zwitterion properties. These molecules are neutral overall, and have an equal number of positive and negative charges to mimic the molecules on the cell's surface. The researchers compared the characteristics of two polymer coatings on the polylactic acid (PLA) nanoparticles, a biocompatible material easily cleared by the body.

The first coating, made of polyethylene glycol (PEG), had already been tested on the zebrafish, whose transparent body makes it possible to see the distribution of nanoparticles virtually in real time. The second coating, made of zwitterionic polymer, was compared under the same conditions.

[...] According to Société Alzheimer de Québec, neurodegenerative diseases currently affect more than 565,000 Canadians, including 152,121 in Québec.

Journal Reference:
Jean-Michel Rabanel, et al. Nanoparticle shell structural cues drive in vitro transport properties, tissue distribution and brain accessibility in zebrafish, Biomaterials (2021). (DOI: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2021.121085)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Chaotic early solar system collisions resembled 'Asteroids' arcade game:

Nearly 30 years later, a new analysis of that same Peekskill meteorite and 17 others by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has led to a new hypothesis about how asteroids formed during the early years of the solar system.

The meteorites studied in the research originated from asteroids and serve as natural samples of the space rocks. They indicate that the asteroids formed though violent bombardment and subsequent reassembly, a finding that runs counter to the prevailing idea that the young solar system was a peaceful place.

The study was published in print Dec.1 in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

The research began when co-author Nick Dygert was a postdoctoral fellow at UT's Jackson School of Geosciences studying terrestrial rocks using a method that could measure the cooling rates of rocks from very high temperatures, up to 1,400 degrees Celsius.

Dygert, now an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, realized that this method -- called a rare earth element (REE)-in-two-pyroxene thermometer -- could work for space rocks, too.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[...] The global chip shortage will soon cause a number of new BMWs to lose their touchscreen functionality. According to a recent Bimmerfest forum post, in an effort to save silicon and have BMW maintain its current production levels, the following models will be delivered to customers without touchscreen capabilities:

"This measure is a result of the industry-wide supply chain issues which are affecting automotive manufacturing worldwide and causing limitations on the availability of some features or options," BMW told Edmunds on Thursday. BMW did not immediately respond to Roadshow's request for comment.

According to Bimmerfest, customers affected by this change will have option code 6UY on their vehicles' window stickers, listed as "deletion of touchscreen." This will result in a $500 credit on the car's MSRP.

[...] It's unclear how long these BMW models will be affected by the chip shortage or if other cars will be added to the no-touchscreen list in the future.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

How space solar panels could power the Earth with 24/7 clean energy:

Solar power has been a key part of humanity's clean-energy repertoire. We spread masses of sunlight-harvesting panels on solar fields, and many people power their homes by decorating their roofs with the rectangles.

But there's a caveat to this wonderful power source. Solar panels can't collect energy at night. To work at peak efficiency, they need as much sunlight as possible. So, to maximize these sun catchers' performance, researchers are toying with a plan to send them to a place where the sun never sets: outer space.

Theoretically, if a bunch of solar panels were blasted into orbit, they'd soak up the sun even on the foggiest days and the darkest nights, storing an enormous amount of power. If that power were wirelessly beamed down to Earth, our planet could breathe in renewable clean energy, 24/7.

[...] In the early 1900s, Russian scientist-mathematician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was steadily churning out a stream of futuristic designs envisioning human tech beyond Earth. He's responsible for conjuring things like space elevators, steerable rockets and, you guessed it, space solar power.

Since Bell Labs first invented the first concrete "solar panel" in the '50s, international scientists have been working to make  Tsiolkovsky's sci-fi fantasy a reality. They include Japanese researchers, the United States military and a team from California Institute of Technology spearheading the Space Solar Power Project.