Smart Energy

The U.S. military manufactures weapons using chips made in China. And there’s evidence that the Chinese are building trap doors in the chips that enable hackers to override locks on the chips, reprogram them, and otherwise undermine the security on the weapons. Here’s from a post on Boing Boing, quoting Sergei Skorobogatov, a postdoc in the Security Group at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge:

We chose an American military chip that is highly secure with sophisticated encryption standard, manufactured in China. We scanned the silicon chip in an affordable time and found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract. If you use this key you can disable the chip or reprogram it at will, even if locked by the user with their own key. This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems. The scale and range of possible attacks has huge implications for National Security and public infrastructure.

I sit here gob-smacked, pondering the implications of incorporating chips made by, if not an enemy than certainly a fierce competitor into key systems that “defend” millions of people.

Update 2012-05-29: Scientific American has picked up this story here.

Over on The Journal of Are You Fucking Kidding Me, the Editor-in-Commandant writes:

if you’ve been injected with succinylcholine (also known as suxamethonium chloride or simple ‘sux’) you’re most likely in a hospital,undergoing intubation with accompanying respiratory support.

Unless, of course, you’re being mind-controlled by aliens, as in my 1999 novel Splitting. The aliens apply sux to one’s mind in order to suck away what you think you know and replace it with what they want you to know. Here’s the first sentence from Splitting (you’ll find a longer excerpt here), pretty much, to my mind, verbalizing the effects of a shot of the above mentioned sux:

The rush from the injection while supplies last kicks me in the chest, a chill metal gasp fleeing custody, a lightning of Tartars hording down my medulla oblongata.

I’m not trying to be coy, or whatever, when I say I’d never heard of a drug called sux before coming across a link to the above JAYFKM post on Boing Boing. Proving, therefore, that the world is not only stranger than we think but stranger than we can think.

40,000 year old flute from the site of Geißenklösterle made from bird bones. The University of Tübingen

Scientists researching a human settlement in southern Germany have discovered some bone flutes they think are some 40,000 years old. LiveScience writer Jennifer Welsh writes on Discovery:

Early modern humans could have spent their evenings sitting around the fire, playing bone flutes and singing songs 40,000 years ago, newly discovered ancient musical instruments indicate. The bone flutes push back the date researchers think human creativity evolved.

• The flutes are the earliest record of technological and artistic innovations characteristic of the Aurignacian period.
• The Danube River was a key corridor for the movement of humans and technological innovations into central Europe.
• Neanderthals as well as modern humans may have lived in this area around the same time.

“These results are consistent with a hypothesis we made several years ago that the Danube River was a key corridor for the movement of humans and technological innovations into central Europe between 40,000 and 45,000 years ago,” study researcher Nick Conard, of Tübingen University, said in a statement. “Geißenklösterle is one of several caves in the region that has produced important examples of personal ornaments, figurative art, mythical imagery and musical instruments. The new dates prove the great antiquity of the Aurignacian in Swabia.”

Wicked awesome solo bass performance of Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”

The Sun Came Out. Highly recommended by Smart Energy.

The Sun Came Out: 7 Worlds Collide Again

How do 20 musicians who’ve never worked together before record an album of original material in three weeks? First, you get Neil Finn to invite you to the wild west coast of New Zealand. Make it for right around Christmas time, the heart of southern hemisphere summer, and have Finn invite not just you, but your whole family.

Ask everyone to bring a song. “We need songs,” Finn would’ve pointed out. “We’re recording an album.”

But no one does, of course, because artists are more human than humans, and thus are more easily distracted, are lazier, are more prone to procrastination. But it doesn’t matter because there is a deadline. Record the album, then play the shows.

Don’t want to let your mates down, so write something good and then learn to play it.

Because we’re not doing this for fun, nor for a nice subtropical vacation, but for Oxfam. So we want it to be good, so people will buy the album and come to the shows so we can make some money and give it all away. Read the rest of this entry »

The El Yunque National Forest in Puerto Rico is a tropical rainforest where a strain of the microbe Enterobacter lignolyticus was found that can tolerate an ionic liquid used to dissolve cellulosic biomass for microbial-based biofuel production. (Credit: Photo by Kristen DeAngelis)

In the search for technology by which economically competitive biofuels can be produced from cellulosic biomass, the combination of sugar-fermenting microbes and ionic liquid solvents looks to be a winner save for one major problem: the ionic liquids used to make cellulosic biomass more digestible for microbes can also be toxic to them. A solution to this conundrum, however, may be in the offing.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a multi-institutional partnership led by Berkeley Lab, have identified a tropical rainforest microbe that can endure relatively high concentrations of an ionic liquid used to dissolve cellulosic biomass. The researchers have also determined how the microbe is able to do this, a discovery that holds broad implications beyond the production of advanced biofuels.

“Our findings represent an important first step in understanding the mechanisms of ionic liquid resistance in bacteria and provide a basis for engineering ionic liquid tolerance into strains of fuel-producing microbes for a more efficient biofuel production process,” says Blake Simmons, a chemical engineer who heads JBEI’s Deconstruction Division and one of the senior investigators for this research.

Adds Michael Thelen, the principal investigator and a member of JBEI’s Deconstruction Division, “Our study also demonstrates that vigorous efforts to discover and analyze the unique properties of microorganisms can provide an important basis for understanding microbial stress and adaptation responses to anthropogenic chemicals used in industry.” Read the rest of this entry »

“Today I lost my best friend,” guitarist Steve Cropper wrote on his Facebook page. “The World has lost the best guy and bass player to ever live.” Cropper, who was on the same Blues Brothers tour in Japan, said Dunn died in his sleep. Dunn was 70.

Having natural habitat in farming areas that supports ladybugs could help increase their abundance in crops where they control pests and help farmers reduce their costs, says a Michigan State University study. Read the rest of this entry »

Image from bagitmovie.wordpress.com

A 100-fold upsurge in human-produced plastic garbage in the ocean is altering habitats in the marine environment, according to a new study led by a graduate student researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

In 2009 an ambitious group of graduate students led the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX) to the North Pacific Ocean Subtropical Gyre aboard the Scripps research vessel New Horizon. During the voyage the researchers, who concentrated their studies a thousand miles west of California, documented an alarming amount of human-generated trash, mostly broken down bits of plastic the size of a fingernail floating across thousands of miles of open ocean.

At the time the researchers didn’t have a clear idea of how such trash might be impacting the ocean environment, but a new study published in the May 9 online issue of the journal Biology Letters reveals that plastic debris in the area popularly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” has increased by 100 times over in the past 40 years, leading to changes in the natural habitat of animals such as the marine insect Halobates sericeus. These “sea skaters” or “water striders”—relatives of pond water skaters—inhabit water surfaces and lay their eggs on flotsam (floating objects). Naturally existing surfaces for their eggs include, for example: seashells, seabird feathers, tar lumps and pumice. In the new study researchers found that sea skaters have exploited the influx of plastic garbage as new surfaces for their eggs. This has led to a rise in the insect’s egg densities in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. Read the rest of this entry »

Listen to this guy walk the bass! Awesome fingerstyle guitar playing.