Amazing Science

Companies are rushing out software fixes for Chipmageddon 1.0. Tech companies are still working overtime on patching two critical vulnerabilities in computer chips that were revealed this week. The flaws, dubbed “Meltdown” and “Spectre,” could let hackers get hold of passwords, encryption keys, and other sensitive information from a computer’s core memory via malicious apps running on devices.

How many chips are affected? The number is something of a moving target. But from the information released so far by tech companies and estimates from chip industry analysts, it looks as if at least three billion chips in computers, tablets, and phones now in use are vulnerable to attack by Spectre, which is the more widespread of the two flaws.

Apple says all its Mac and iOS products are affected, with the exception of the Apple watch. That’s a billion or so devices. Gadgets powered by Google’s Android operating system number more than two billion, the company said last year. Linley Gwennap of the Linley Group, which tracks the chip industry, thinks the security flaws could affect about 500 million of them. As practically all smartphones run on iOS and Android, this pretty much covers the mobile-device landscape.

Then there are PCs and servers. These are largely powered by chips from Intel, whose share price has been battered since news of the flaws emerged. Its chief U.S. competitor, AMD, which has been gaining ground on Intel, said in a blog post  that its chips are not vulnerable to Meltdown and there is a “near zero risk” from one variant of Spectre and zero risk from another.

Still, if some level of threat from Spectre exists, AMD chips merit inclusion. Between them Intel and AMD account for over a billion PC and server chips. In addition, there are a host of smaller chipmakers such as IBM, which has said at least some of its chips are affected. This brings the total to around three billion processors, though this could change as more information emerges. 

Astronomers have probed the inner life of a dead star. Tiny changes in a white dwarf’s brightness reveal that the stellar corpse has more oxygen in its core than expected, researchers report online January 8 in Nature. The finding could challenge theories of how stars live and die, and may have implications for measuring the expansion of the universe.

As a star ages, it sheds most of its gas into space until all that remains is a dense core of carbon and oxygen, the ashes of a lifetime of burning helium (SN: 4/30/16, p. 12). That core, plus a thin shellacking of helium, is called a white dwarf. But the proportion of those elements relative to one another was uncertain. “From theory, we have a rough idea of how it’s supposed to be, but we have no way to measure it directly,” says astrophysicist Noemi Giammichele, now at the Institute of Research in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France.

Luckily, some white dwarfs encode their inner nature on their surface. These stars change their brightness in response to internal vibrations. Astrophysicists can infer a star’s internal structure from the vibrations, similar to how geologists learn about Earth’s interior by measuring seismic waves during an earthquake.

Giammichele and her colleagues used data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which watched stars unblinkingly to track periodic changes in their brightness. Kepler’s chief aim was to find exoplanets, the worlds orbiting distant stars (SN Online: 10/31/17).

But it also monitored white dwarf KIC 08626021, located 1,375 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, for 23 months. The observations provided the highest-precision data ever on tiny changes in a white dwarf’s brightness and, indirectly, its vibrations.

Next, Giammichele borrowed a computer simulation technique from her former life as an aeronautical engineer to figure out how the changes in vibrations related to the makeup of the core. The team ran millions of simulations, looking for one that reproduced the exact light changes that Kepler observed. One simulation fit the data perfectly, showing that the white dwarf had the expected carbon and oxygen core with a thin shell of helium.

But the details were surprising. The core was about 86 percent oxygen, 15 percent greater than physicists had previously calculated. That suggests that something about the processes that convert helium to carbon and oxygen or mix elements in the star’s core during its active lifetime must boost the amount of oxygen.

Four other white dwarfs show a similar trend, says study coauthor Gilles Fontaine, an astrophysicist at the University of Montreal.  “We certainly will go ahead and analyze many more.” If other white dwarfs turn out to be similar, the results will send theorists who study stellar evolution back to the drawing board, he says.

White dwarfs are also thought to be the precursors of type 1a supernovas. These catastrophic stellar explosions were once thought to have the same intrinsic brightness, meaning they appeared brighter or dimmer depending only on their distance from Earth. Measuring their actual distances led to the discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate (SN: 8/6/16, p. 10), which physicists explain by invoking a mysterious substance called dark energy.

A Northwestern University professor, working in conjunction with the global beauty company L'Oréal, has developed the smallest wearable device in the world. The wafer-thin, feather-light sensor can fit on a fingernail and precisely measures a person's exposure to UV light from the sun.

The device, as light as a raindrop and smaller in circumference than an M&M, is powered by the sun and contains the world's most sophisticated and accurate UV dosimeter. It was unveiled Sunday, Jan. 7, at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and will be called UV Sense.

"We think it provides the most convenient, most accurate way for people to measure sun exposure in a quantitative manner," said Northwestern engineer John A. Rogers. "The broader goal is to provide a technology platform that can save lives and reduce skin cancers by allowing individuals, on a personalized level, to modulate their exposure to the sun."

UV Sense has no moving parts, no battery, is waterproof and can be attached to almost any part of the body or clothing, where it continuously measures UV exposure in a unique accumulation mode.

Rogers said the device, created in a partnership with L'Oréal, is meant to stick on a thumbnail -- a stable, rigid surface that ensures robust device adherence. It's also an optimal location to measure exposure to the sun. "It is orders of magnitude smaller than anything else out there," Rogers said. "It also is one of the few sensors that directly measures the most harmful UV rays. Further, it simultaneously records body temperature, which is also very important in the context of sun exposure."

Users need only to download an app on their smartphone, then swipe the phone over the device to see their exposure to the sun, either for that day or over time. The app can suggest other, less UV-intense times for outdoor activities or give peace of mind to individuals who are concerned about overexposure.

"UV Sense is transformative technology that permits people to receive real-time advice via mobile phone messages when they exceed their daily safe sun limit," said June K. Robinson, M.D., research professor of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Roger's research group at Northwestern, in collaboration with Robinson and researchers at Feinberg, have received a roughly $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to deploy the fingernail UV sensors in human clinical studies of sun exposure in cohorts of subjects who are at risk for melanoma. The first pre-pilot field trials launched in December.

"Sunlight is the most potent known carcinogen," Rogers said. "It's responsible for more cancers than any other carcinogen known to man, and it's everywhere -- even in Chicago."

A scientist has finally confirmed with 3D models that legendary ice man Ötzi was indeed killed 5,300 years ago by an arrow.

Ötzi, a 5,300-year-old mummified man, was found in 1991 in a glacier in the Alps between what is now Austria and Italy. Since the discovery, Ötzi has been examined by multiple teams of scientists, with new discoveries coming to light each time. Now an expert claims it was the arrow that delivered the fatal blow, severing the nerve to his shoulder and hitting his major vessels.

Since his discovery on 19 December 1991 by German hikers, Ӧtzi has provided window into early human history. His mummified remains were uncovered in melting glacier in the mountainous border between Austria and Italy. Analysis of the body has told us that he was alive during the Copper Age and died a grisly death.

Ötzi, who was 46 at the time of his death, had brown eyes, relatives in Sardinia, and was lactose intolerant. He was also predisposed to heart disease. Recent research focused on the DNA in the nuclei of Ötzi's cells, and it could yield further insights into the famous ice mummy's life.

A minority of people are genuinely turned on by intelligence, according to new psychology research. The study, recently published online in the scientific journal Intelligence, found that most people desire a partner who is smart. Furthermore, a small percentage of them reported that they were specifically sexually aroused by intelligence.

“A lot of research had shown that ‘intelligent’ was a highly ranked characteristic in a partner, but I had my doubts that people preferred a very high level of intelligence in a partner,” explained Gilles Gignac, a senior lecturer at the University of Western Australia.

“Because much the previous research in the area had used rank measurement, it was impossible to tell what level of intelligence people, on average, preferred. A different type of study needed to be conducted to find out,” he told PsyPost.

“A second part of the study was relevant to the word ‘sapiosexual,’ a person who finds high levels of intelligence the most sexually attractive characteristic in a partner,” Gignac said. “The word sapiosexual had been used in popular culture, but had not yet been investigated scientifically. Consequently, I wondered whether sapiosexuality could be measured with a conventional psychometric scale and how many self-described sapiosexuals there might be in the population.”

For their study, Gignac and his colleagues surveyed 383 adults regarding what traits they valued in a romantic partner and how attracted they were to people of varying intelligence levels.

“Intelligent” was the second most highly ranked trait, behind “kind and understanding.” The third and fourth most highly rated traits were “exciting personality” and “easygoing,” respectively. The researchers also found that people rated those with a higher intelligence as more attractive. But this effect appeared to have a ceiling. “We found that the association between desirability of a prospective partner and IQ of the prospective partner is curvilinear: it peaks at an IQ of 120 (90th percentile) and drops a bit from 120 to 135 (99th percentile),” Gignac explains.

at if scientists could develop an opioid-based painkiller that is not addictive and has limited side effects? That is possible based on new findings by an international team of scientists that included contributions from top researchers at the Bridge Institute at the USC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience.

The international team captured the crystal structure of the kappa opioid receptor — critical for providing pain relief — in action on the surface of human brain cells. The researchers also made another important discovery: a new opioid-based compound that, unlike current opioids, activates only the kappa opioid receptor, raising hopes that they may develop a painkiller that has no risk of addiction and, therefore, none of the devastating consequences and side effects that accompany it.

The findings are published Jan. 4, 2018, in the journal Cell. They are an example of how USC Michelson Center scientists collaborate with a range of experts in multiple disciplines to conduct groundbreaking research, including the opioid addiction.

We often think of robots as superior to ourselves, but when it comes to the abilities afforded us by our muscles, robots have a hard time keeping up. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are working to change that with newly-developed soft muscles that work a lot like our own, and can even heal themselves from certain kinds of damage.

The new robo-muscles are called hydraulically amplified self-healing electrostatic actuators, or HASEL for short. They’re a potential replacement for hard metal motors and hydraulic pistons that robotics designers often lean on to provide their creations with movement. In a pair of papers published this week in Science and Science Robotics, the researchers describe their biologically-inspired soft robot muscles as having the potential to revolutionize how robots move.

The muscles are built using small flexible pouches which are filled with oil. The pouches have electrodes embedded in them and when electricity is applied the oil tenses up and creates an artificial muscle contraction. When the electricity is cut off, it relaxes again, and the faux muscles can flex and relax instantly, just like a real muscle.

“HASEL actuators synergize the strengths of soft fluidic and soft electrostatic actuators, and thus combine versatility and performance like no other artificial muscle before,” Christoph Keplinger, senior author of the research, explains. “Just like biological muscle, HASEL actuators can reproduce the adaptability of an octopus arm, the speed of a hummingbird and the strength of an elephant.”

What’s particularly interesting about this new robotic muscle tech is that it’s incredibly cheap to produce. The oil, elastic bags, and electrodes that make up the muscle only cost pennies, and they work as well or better than a traditional electric motor. However, the one drawback is that the electricity the muscles crave can be a steep requirement, and a bot equipped with such muscles might burn through its power reserves at a rapid pace.

Still, it’s a remarkable breakthrough in the field of soft robotics and if further work on the concept can yield strong muscles without such a high power demand, it could change the way the robots of the future are designed and built.

Using detailed 3D images, researchers have shown how bacteria have evolved molecular motors of different powers to optimize their swimming. The discovery, by a team from Imperial College London, provides insights into evolution at the molecular scale.

Bacteria use molecular motors just tens of nanometers wide to spin a tail (or ‘flagellum’) that pushes them through their habitat.

Like human-made motors, the structure of these nanoscale machines determines their power and the bacteria’s swimming ability. Bacterial motors are complex machines, but with studies like this we can see how they have evolved in distinct steps. Previously, the team from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial looked at these motors and discovered a key factor that determined how strongly bacteria could swim. Like human-made motors, bacterial motors have distinct ‘stator’ and ‘rotor’ components that spin against each other.

The team found that the more stator structures the bacterial motor possessed, the larger its turning force, and the stronger the bacterium swam. Despite these differences, DNA sequence analysis shows that the core motors are ancestrally related. This led scientists to question how structure and swimming diversity evolved from the same core design.

Now, in new research published today in the journal  Scientific Reports, the researchers were able to build a ‘family tree’ of bacterial motors by combining 3D imaging with DNA analysis. This allowed them to understand what ancestral motors may have looked like, and how they could have evolved into the sophisticated motors seen today.

It’s like having “an elephant stand on your thumb.” That’s how deep-sea physiologist and ecologist Mackenzie Gerringer describes the pressure squeezing down on the deepest known living fish, some 8 kilometers down. What may help these small, pale Mariana snailfish survive elephantine squashing, says Gerringer of the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs, is a body bulked up, especially at the rump, with a watery goo.

The snailfish family gets its nickname from the way some shallow-water species in thundering tides grip a rock with a little suction cup on the belly and curl up. “Quite cute,” Gerringer says, and maybe, if you squint, somewhat like a snail.

She and colleagues discovered the deepest fish in 2014 in the western Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench and described the newly named Psuedoliparis swirei November 28 in Zootaxa. To catch specimens, Gerringer and colleagues turned to extreme trapping. They weighted a boxy, mesh-sided trap with steel plates to sink it. It took about four hours to fall to the bottom.

The scientists baited traps with mackerel, which snailfish don’t eat. But the fish do eat the underwater amphipods that mob a mackerel feast. Remotely related to harmless garden pill bugs, trench amphipods clean mackerel to the bones, Gerringer says. “I certainly wouldn’t swallow a live amphipod after seeing what they can do.” A snailfish, however, has a second set of jaws at the back of its throat that render crustaceans safe to swallow.

For animals that live in such extreme pressures and temperatures (1° or 2° Celsius), snailfish don’t “look very robust … or very armored,” she says. “You can actually see the brain through the skull.” Skimping on dense muscles and bones may improve snailfish buoyancy and save energy. These fish also lack air pockets that give a little lift to some other fishes, but that would get squashed to nothing so far down. Instead, the snailfish have inner deposits of a watery goo, more buoyant than muscles and bones and less compressible than air.

The goo also may aid swimming efficiency by offering a cheap shape improvement, Gerringer and colleagues proposed December 6 in Royal Society Open Science. To test the idea, she 3-D printed and motorized a robo-snailfish. Easier than catching a real one, Gerringer says. A latex sleeve around the robot tail let her add or subtract water as an approximation of the gelatinous tissue. With an empty sleeve, the wide fish body pinches in to a thin tail, inviting vortices that cause drag. With this abrupt narrowing, robo-swimming proved a struggle. Filling the tail-sleeve to create a tapering rear let the robo-snailfish swim faster.

This goo is cheap tissue to grow, Gerringer says. It’s mostly water, one thing a fish living underneath eight kilometers of ocean has in abundance.

A University of Michigan (U-M) team has announced plans to develop an “unhackable” computer, funded by a new $3.6 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal of the project, called MORPHEUS, is to design computers that avoid the vulnerabilities of most current microprocessors, such as the Spectre and Meltdown flaws announced  recently. The $50 million DARPA System Security Integrated Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) program aims to build security right into chips’ microarchitecture, instead of relying on software patches. The U-M grant is one of nine that DARPA has recently funded through SSITH.

Future-proofing

The idea is to protect against future threats that have yet to be identified. “Instead of relying on software Band-Aids to hardware-based security issues, we are aiming to remove those hardware vulnerabilities in ways that will disarm a large proportion of today’s software attacks,” said Linton Salmon, manager of DARPA’s System Security Integrated Through Hardware and Firmware program.

Under MORPHEUS, the location of passwords would constantly change, for example. And even if an attacker were quick enough to locate the data, secondary defenses in the form of encryption and domain enforcement would throw up additional roadblocks.

More than 40 percent of the “software doors” that hackers have available to them today would be closed if researchers could eliminate seven classes of hardware weaknesses**, according to DARPA.

DARPA is aiming to render these attacks impossible within five years. “If developed, MORPHEUS could do it now,” said Todd Austin, U-M professor of computer science and engineering, who leads the project. Researchers at The University of Texas and Princeton University are also working with U-M.

Researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine have successfully developed a method to grow hairy skin from mouse pluripotent stem cells—a discovery that could lead to new approaches to model disease and new therapies for the treatment of skin disorders and cancers.

This research, recently published online in the journal Cell Reports, marks the first demonstration that hair follicles can be grown in cultures of stem cells. The study was led by Karl Koehler, PhD, assistant professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at IU School of Medicine, and a postdoctoral fellow in his lab, Jiyoon Lee, PhD.

“The skin is a complex organ that has been difficult to fully recreate and maintain in culture for research purposes,” said Dr. Koehler, who explains more in a blog post. “Our study shows how to encourage hair development from lab grown mouse skin, which has been particularly troublesome for researchers to recreate in culture." 

Dr. Koehler and his team’s findings build on their past work creating a technique for growing inner ear cells from stem cells, in which mouse stem cells are cultured in a three-dimensional ball and treated with specific signaling molecules to coax the cells into producing inner ear tissue. The researchers noticed that skin was a byproduct of the inner ear growth process.

“In the developing embryo, the inner ear comes from the same layer of cells as the top layer of the skin, [the epidermis], so it was no surprise that skin and inner ear tissue formed in tandem,” Dr. Koehler said. “We were surprised to find that the bottom layer of the skin [the dermis] also develops.”

In the current study, Dr. Koehler and his team show how the epidermis and dermis cells form a sphere-like cluster of cells, called a skin “organoid.” The cells in skin organoids are organized much like cells in normal skin, but inside-out, meaning the top layer of the skin faces the interior of the organoid.  

The team identified culture conditions that allowed skin organoids to proceed through the stages of development much like skin in the embryo. “After about 20 days, we were amazed to see that skin organoids sprouted hair follicles,” Dr. Koehler said. “The roots of the follicles protrude from the skin organoids in all directions.”

The researchers confirmed that the timing of development and expression of key proteins closely match skin and hair development in the mouse embryo. To validate their findings, the IU team collaborated with Stefan Heller, PhD, Edward C. and Amy H. Sewall Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Stanford University, whose lab members confirmed that the technique was reproducible with stem cells from other mouse strains. 

Observations of a nearby stellar nursery have revealed an “astonishing” overabundance of gigantic stars with masses up to 200 times the mass of the Sun.

According to a study published today in the journal Science, the universe is teeming with many more massive stars than astronomers previously thought. Since massive stars play a crucial role in shaping our universe — through stellar winds, supernovae explosions, and the production of heavy elements — the excess of heavyweights has far-reaching implications.

Because extremely large stars live hard and die young, they are notoriously difficult to study. Here, the researchers discovered the surplus of massive stars by observing a star-forming region known as the Tarantula Nebula (30 Doradus), which is located some 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy. Since this region just began producing stars about 8 million years ago, it is the perfect laboratory for astronomers to study young, massive stars.

As part of the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey (VFTS), the team used the ESO’s Very Large Telescope to gather detailed spectroscopic observations of nearly 1,000 massive stars in the Tarantula Nebula. By meticulously analyzing 247 of these stars (with masses ranging between 15 and 200 times the mass of the Sun), the team was able to determine the mass distribution of stars born in the nebulous nursery. The researchers then translated this catalog of stellar “birth weights” into a mathematical function known as an initial mass function (IMF), which astronomers use to relate a star’s mass to its color, age, and brightness.

Astronomers used to believe that extremely massive stars were somewhat of a rarity in the universe, with less than 1% of all stars being born with masses greater than ten times the mass of the Sun; however, this assumption was based on former IMFs, which were created using plenty of data from low-mass stars, but very little data from high-mass stars.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft was a little more than one Earth diameter from Jupiter when it captured this mind-bending, color-enhanced view of the planet’s tumultuous atmosphere.

Jupiter completely fills the image, with only a hint of the terminator (where daylight fades to night) in the upper right corner, and no visible limb (the curved edge of the planet).

Juno took this image of colorful, turbulent clouds in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere on Dec. 16, 2017 at 9:43 a.m. PST (12:43 p.m. EST) from 8,292 miles (13,345 kilometers) above the tops of Jupiter’s clouds, at a latitude of 48.9 degrees. The spatial scale in this image is 5.8 miles/pixel (9.3 kilometers/pixel).

Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran processed this image using data from the JunoCam imager. JunoCam's raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at: www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam       

More information about Juno is at:

https://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu

For the first time, an international team of researchers - including Lancaster University - has measured the escalating rate of coral bleaching at locations throughout the tropics over the past four decades. The study documents a dramatic shortening of the gap between pairs of bleaching events, threatening the future existence of these iconic ecosystems and the livelihoods of many millions of people.

"The time between bleaching events at each location has diminished five-fold in the past 3-4 decades, from once every 25-30 years in the early 1980s to an average of just once every six years since 2010," says lead author Professor Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE).

"Before the 1980s, mass bleaching of corals was unheard of, even during strong El Niño conditions, but now repeated bouts of regional-scale bleaching and mass mortality of corals has become the new normal around the world as temperatures continue to rise."

The study establishes a transition from a period before the 1980s when bleaching only occurred locally, to an intermediate stage in the 1980s and 1990s when mass bleaching was first recorded during warmer than average El Niño conditions, and finally to the current era when climate-driven bleaching is now occurring throughout ENSO cycles.

The researchers show that tropical sea temperatures are warmer today during cooler than average La Niña conditions than they were 40 years ago during El Niño periods. “Coral bleaching is a stress response caused by exposure of coral reefs to elevated ocean temperatures. When bleaching is severe and prolonged, many of the corals die. It takes at least a decade to replace even the fastest-growing species," explained co-author Professor Nick Graham of Lancaster University.