Computer security is broken from top to bottom

OVER a couple of days in February, hundreds of thousands of point-of-sale printers in restaurants around the world began behaving strangely. Some churned out bizarre pictures of computers and giant robots signed, “with love from the hacker God himself”. Some informed their owners that, “YOUR PRINTER HAS BEEN PWND’D”. Some told them, “For the love of God, please close this port”. When the hacker God gave an interview to Motherboard, a technology website, he claimed to be a British secondary-school pupil by the name of “Stackoverflowin”. Annoyed by the parlous state of computer security, he had, he claimed, decided to perform a public service by demonstrating just how easy it was to seize control.

Not all hackers are so public-spirited, and 2016 was a bonanza for those who are not. In February of that year cyber-crooks stole $81m directly from the central bank of Bangladesh—and would have got away with more were it not for a crucial typo. In August America’s National Security Agency (NSA) saw its own hacking tools leaked all over the internet by a group calling themselves the Shadow Brokers. (The CIA suffered a similar indignity this March.) In October a piece…Continue reading
Source: Economist

SpaceX successfully reuses a rocket booster

IT WAS a nice piece of marketing. The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 6.27pm on March 30th by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocketry company, had already been into space once. But there was to be no talk of “used” hardware. Instead, insisted the company, the booster was “flight proven”. And in the end, its mission—to deliver a communications satellite into geostationary orbit—went off without a hitch.

PR aside, successfully relaunching a used rocket is another impressive achievement for the firm. When Mr Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, his goal was a drastic cut in the cost of getting things into orbit. He has already delivered, to some extent: launch costs for a satellite on a Falcon 9 are substantially lower than on other rockets. But he has always insisted that cheap spaceflight will only be truly possible once rockets become reusable.

It is hard to argue. Aside from the Falcon 9, all the rockets flying commercially today are one-shot affairs. No airline would dream of destroying its planes after every flight. Yet once rockets have done their job, they are either dropped into the sea or abandoned in space. SpaceX hopes to change…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Managing supplies of vaccines is a huge problem

KEEP a tomato cool in a refrigerator and it will stay fresh far longer than it would at room temperature. Accidentally freeze it, though, and you will reduce it to a disgusting mush.

A similar problem plagues the storage of vaccines. About six in ten of those procured by UNICEF, the UN’s children’s fund, must be stored at a temperature between 2°C and 8°C. Generally, the focus of efforts to do this is on the top end of the range, with the establishment of “cold chains”, the links of which are refrigerators on the journey from factory to clinic, to stop vaccines overheating. Less effort is put into making sure a vaccine never gets too cold. But a vial of vaccine that has been accidentally frozen, and then thawed, may lose its potency as surely as one that has been warmed up.

A study published this week in Vaccine, by Celina Hanson of UNICEF and her colleagues, suggests that the overchilling of vaccines is alarmingly common. Dr Hanson and her team reviewed research that measured how often vaccines were exposed to temperatures below the lower limit. They combed through papers published between 2006 and 2015, and found 21 relevant studies conducted in 18 countries. Though not a representative global sweep, the studies in question covered both rich countries and poor ones, from several continents. Among the places they examined…Continue reading
Source: Economist

A simple device designed to detect chemical weapons

NERVE agents such as sarin and VX can kill quickly in low doses. Kim Jong Nam, half brother of Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s leader, was recently murdered by having VX smeared on his face at Kuala Lumpur airport. Though the use of nerve agents is supposed to be banned by treaty, governments and terrorists have deployed them, and may do so again in the future. At the moment, there is no simple way for soldiers in the field, or inspectors looking for manufacturing and storage sites, to detect nerve agents. The electrochemical sensors involved are bulky and awkward to use.

On civvy street, meanwhile, similar chemicals are employed as pesticides to ward off insects that might otherwise damage fruit and vegetable crops. If such crops are not thoroughly washed after picking, or have been overdosed in the first place, then they, too, may present a health hazard. Yet inspecting them to see if they are contaminated can also be a hassle.

It would be better all round if people had suitable detection technology available at their fingertips. And Joseph Wang of the University of California, San Diego, reports in ACS Sensors that he has a system that achieves this quite literally.

Sarin, VX and their kind are chemicals called organophosphorus compounds, which can be deactivated by an enzyme known as organophosphorus hydrolase. Existing…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Airborne particles cause more than 3m early deaths a year

GOVERNMENTS fret over traffic and other local nuisances that create filthy air. But research just published in Nature by Zhang Qiang, of Tsinghua University in Beijing, and an international team including environmental economists, physicists and disease experts, suggests the problem has a global dimension, too. Dr Zhang’s analysis estimates that in 2007—the first year for which complete industrial, epidemiological and trade data were available when the team started work—more than 3m premature deaths around the world were caused by emissions of fine particulate matter (known as PM2.5, because the particles in question are less than 2.5 microns across).

Of these, the team reckon just under an eighth were associated with pollutants released in a part of the world different from that in which the death occurred, thanks to transport of such particles from place to place by the wind. Almost twice as many (22% of the total) were a consequence of goods and services that were produced in one region (often poor) and then exported for consumption in another (often rich, and with more finicky environmental standards for its own manufacturers).

In effect, such rich countries are exporting air pollution, and its associated deaths, as they import goods. As far as China is concerned, that phenomenon is probably abating. Chinese coal…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Small-brained birds get killed by cars

I’m okay. I know the Green Cross Code

NATURAL selection is a harsh interrogator at the best of times. But if you are a bird, it has an extra question, not asked so forcefully of animals that cannot fly: “is that extra gram of weight really necessary?” Contrary to the insult “bird-brained”, birds are not notably more stupid than mammals, but the pressure to keep organs light applies to the cerebrum as much as it does to anything else.

For the past century, though, birds have faced a new enemy that might require them to get smarter: the motor car. These days, cars and other motorised vehicles kill around 250m birds a year. That sounds like a significant selective pressure, so Anders Moller, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Paris-Sud, in France, decided to find out whether it really was.

Dr Moller’s hypothesis was that avoiding vehicles needs intelligence, and intelligence needs a big brain. The conclusion of this syllogism is that small-brained birds are more likely to be road-kill than large-brained birds are. To test this idea, though, he needed data on a lot of dead birds.

That serendipity plays a part…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Elon Musk enters the world of brain-computer interfaces

EVER since ENIAC, the first computer that could be operated by a single person, began flashing its ring counters in 1946, human beings and calculating machines have been on a steady march towards tighter integration. Computers entered homes in the 1980s, then migrated onto laps, into pockets and around wrists. In the laboratory, computation has found its way onto molars and into eyeballs. The logical conclusion of all this is that computers will, one day, enter the brain.

This, at least, is the bet behind a company called Neuralink, just started by Elon Musk, a serial technological entrepreneur. Information about Neuralink is sparse, but trademark filings state that it will make invasive devices for treating or diagnosing neurological ailments. Mr Musk clearly has bigger plans, though. He has often tweeted cryptic messages referring to “neural lace”, a science-fictional concept invented by Iain M. Banks, a novelist, that is, in essence, a machine interface woven into the brain.

Although devices that can read and write data to and from the brain as easily as they would to and from a computer remain firmly in the realm of imagination, that has not stopped…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Analysing brain signals to let a patient control his arm

DURING a 250km (150-mile) bike ride for charity in Ohio, William Kochevar found himself cycling behind a mail van when it pulled over to make deliveries. Distracted and tired, Mr Kochevar did not brake in time. The accident, in 2006, left him paralysed from the shoulders down. Now, with the help of electrodes that transmit signals from his brain to his muscles, he has been able to grasp a fork and feed himself for the first time in over a decade. The procedure that allowed Mr Kochevar to achieve the feat is reported in the Lancet this week.

Bolu Ajiboye and Bob Kirsch, biomedical engineers at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to locate nerve cells responsible for arm movements in the motor cortex of Mr Kochevar’s brain. The technique highlighted a patch of his brain to which the blood supply increased whenever Mr Kochevar imagined moving his arm. The team then implanted at that spot two 4x4mm chips, each with an array of 96 tiny electrodes, to measure the electrical activity of the 100 or so nerve cells there. They also implanted 36 stimulating electrodes in the muscles of his right hand and arm.

With the…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Are laboratory mice too clean?

THE hygiene hypothesis posits that certain diseases—notably asthma, eczema and type-1 diabetes—which are becoming more common than they once were, are caused in part by modern environments being too clean. The diseases in question result from misfunctions of the immune system. The hygiene hypothesis suggests such misfunctions are the result of children’s immune systems being unable to learn, by appropriate exposure to viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasitic worms, how to respond properly.

If modern human homes are unnaturally clean, though, they are as nothing compared with the facilities in which experimental mice are housed. Those are practically sterile. That led Lili Tao and Tiffany Reese, two researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre, in Dallas, to wonder if such mice would display extreme versions of the predictions of the hygiene hypothesis.

This would matter, because mice are often used in medical experiments on the assumption that their reactions are similar enough to those of human beings for them to act as stand-ins. Conversely, laboratories’ spotlessness might also mean mice are sometimes too healthy to act as useful…Continue reading
Source: Economist

Assessing the importance of scientific work

ONE role academic journals have come to play that was not, as it were, part of their original job-description of disseminating scientific results (see article), is as indicators of a researcher’s prowess, and thus determinants of academic careers. Publication in a top-notch title such as Nature or Science is an adornment to a scientist’s CV that is unlikely to be overlooked by an appointment committee. Using such publications as endorsements is, though, necessarily a rule of thumb. A paper’s true quality is better revealed by the number of times it is cited elsewhere (ideally, in papers other than those written by the original’s authors). But citations take time to accumulate. Other, faster means of assessment would be welcome.

That has led to the development of alternative metrics, or “altmetrics”. These extend the concept of citation beyond references in other scientific papers—by recording, for example, how often a paper is downloaded, or when the outcome of a…Continue reading
Source: Economist