For all the time humanity has existed, every single person has spent their lives under normal Earth gravity — 9.806 meters per second squared. And then, a few decades ago human beings started spending days, then weeks, and then months in freefall. We’re only now beginning to understand what living without gravity does to the body, but it’s not good. Kinesiologists Leigh Gabel and Steven Boyd from the University of Calgary have published a new study that examines the bones of astronauts, finding that extended time in space causes degradation in bones that never fully reverses. If our future is in space, this could be a major problem.
The pair does not mince words in the study, which was published in the journalScientific Reports. They call the effects of weightlessness on astronaut skeletons “profound.” Even after a year back on Earth, bone density does not fully recover. Essentially, being in space for even a few months causes your bones to age at an increased rate — as much as 10 years per flight.
This study focused on people who had been on long-duration space missions, which means three months or longer, in this case. In partnership with NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Gabel and Boyd examined 17 astronauts (14 men and three women) both before and after a 6-12 month excursion in space.
Only one of the astronauts in the study saw bone density return to normal after an extended time back on Earth. For the others, most of the density loss was concentrated in weight-bearing bones of the lower extremities, but the arms did return to normal after about a year. The team analyzed the mineral content and density of bones, allowing them to determine how the “failure load” had changed. On average, the failure load of the astronauts’ tibias before spaceflight was 10,579 newtons, but that dropped to 495 newtons after the mission. They partially recovered as time went on, but after a year were still down an average of 152 newtons.
Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin exercises on the ISS in 2012.
The researchers also note that those who were in space longer suffered greater drops in bone strength. Astronauts who were on the International Space Station for longer than six months recovered less of their bone density after returning. That suggests that long-term missions, like the ones planned for the Artemis Program, could have serious impacts on astronaut health down the road. It also raises more questions about how humans would fare long-term in an environment where there is less gravity than Earth, for example on the Moon or Mars.
It may be possible to mitigate the effects of weightlessness to some degree. Astronauts undertake a rigorous routine of exercise under simulated gravity during missions to prevent muscle wasting. The researchers used data on exercise routines in the study, and they say added focus on the legs (deadlifts, for example) could reduce density loss. However, we may be years from fully understanding how the body responds to microgravity.
Valve has quietly changed the Steam Deck’s specs, unbeknownst to most who have put in an order in recent weeks.
Steam Decks ordered at the time of the console’s release came with either a 256 or 512GB SSD, which were connected using an x4 PCIe connection. SSDs in more recently ordered consoles, however, are connected using just two lanes,accordingto the German tech blog HardwareLuxx. PC Gamerspottedthe blog post Wednesday.
Cutting the drive’s bandwidth in this way could hypothetically result in slower performance. Worse, Valve didn’t disclose the change in a company statement, or in an email to customers, leaving new Steam Deck owners to find out on their own whether they received a console with altered specs. (PC Gamer’s report includes instructions for those who want to risk a peek.) The only “notice” Valve put out around the time of the change was an edit to the console’s webpage. According to theWayback Machine, the edit was made at the end of May.
The Steam Deck’s specs page contains quiet edits to its SSD info.
So far,testsperformed by Kotaku have failed to find any real differences in performance, such as with load times or FPS. This must be a relief for Valve, which scrambled to explain the switch as soon as it became publicly known. The console’s design teamfollowed upwith PC Gamer by saying users won’t notice a difference except in “extremely uncommon cases.” According to them, the change was essential if Valve wanted to grab hold of the sticky supply chain, which (as we’re all exhaustingly familiar with by now) has been wrecking electronics manufacturing for a couple years. The new SSD option enables Valve to double its weekly Steam Deck shipments—a welcome development for those who ordered theirs a bit late in the game.
“Our team has tested both components extensively, and determined that there is no impact to performance between the two models,” Steam Deck designer Lawrence Yang told PC Gamer.
Still, it isn’t unreasonable for customers to wish Valve had clearly conveyed the change earlier on. Switching up the console’s hardware doesn’t make up nearly as much of the problem as the lack of communication does. That being said, plenty of gaming—er, testing—will be required to determine whether Valve’s dismissal of potential performance issues is well-warranted.
Last week, rumors surfaced that Samsung would soon claim it had beaten TSMC to the 3nm punch. Yesterday, Samsung confirmed the news with a celebratory press release. It is the first global foundry to begin 3nm silicon production. It’s also the first foundry to move beyond FinFET to gate-all-around (GAA) transistors, which is a major achievement. We should note that nowhere in Samsung’s press release does it say it’s begun high volume manufacturing (HVM). Therefore, it’s unclear how many wafer’s it’s capable of producing at this time.
The news marks the culmination of a multi-year effort by Samsung to hit this crucial milestone without serious delays. Samsung first announced its GAA design in 2019, calling it MBCFET. That stands for Multi-Bridge Channel Field Effect Transistor, which is a nanosheet design. This is different than Intel’s RibbonFET process, which uses thin nanowires. TSMC will also be moving to nanosheets, but not until 2nm. For 3nm it’s sticking with FinFET via a customizable design named FinFlex. TSMC is expected to begin 3nm production sometime in late 2022.
(Image: Samsung)
The announcement from Samsung offered some numbers to quantify the benefits of the move to GAA. Compared to 5nm, its 3nm process allows for a 45 percent reduction in power consumption, 23 percent more performance, and a 16 percent reduction in area. The company’s second generation 3nm process will take things even further. It’s promising a 50 percent reduction in power, 30 percent more performance, and a reduction in area of 35 percent. Samsung has said previously its second generation design will arrive approximately one year after its predecessor. Its first generation 3nm nanosheet design is focused on “high performance, low power computing” the company stated. It will then move to focusing on chips for mobile applications.
Samsung’s nanosheet design will allow it to precisely fine-tune the characteristics of the transistors. By tweaking the width of the sheets, it can customize the power and performance curve with more precision than what FinFET allows. For more power/performance it can use wider sheets, or narrower sheets to improve efficiency.
So far Samsung hasn’t announced any official customers or products for its 3nm process. It’s also not clear when it will begin high volume manufacturing, and what kind of yields it’s achieved. Still, it’s a shot across the bow of its main rival TSMC. As noted by Anandtech, Samsung has been losing customers to TSMC lately. In May Qualcomm announced it was moving to TSMC for its Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC. Obviously, Samsung would like to reverse that trend, and reaching 3nm is a feather in its cap along those efforts, if it can get yields up. When TSMC begins 3nm production later this year, it’ll be interesting to see how its flexible FinFET design stacks up against Samsung’s GAAFET. Intel isn’t expected to leave the FinFET era until 2024 with its 20A “Angstrom” process. Like TSMC’s, its Intel 3 node will still use FinFET.
Image Credit: Peellden, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
(Photo: Peellden, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Taiwanese chip-making powerhouse TSMC is telling its customers to get with the times. The company recently stated it’s attempting to get customers using older, antiquated nodes to transition their products to newer nodes, such as its 28nm process. TSMC says it will even help them move, like a good friend with a pickup. This applies mostly to companies using the comparatively ancient 40nm and 65nm nodes.
News of TSMC’s plans come from Kevin Zhang, senior VP of business development at TSMC. According to Anandtech, TSMC has no plans to build any more fab capacity for some of its older, mature nodes. All the capacity that exists today for 40nm and beyond is all that will ever exist. “We are not currently [expanding capacity for] the 40 nm node” he said. “You build a fab, fab will not come online [until] two year or three years from now. So, you really need to think about where the future product is going, not where the product is today.” Anandtech says TSMC currently gets about 25 percent of its revenue from mature processes like 40nm and larger. However, those nodes are long since paid for, and the wafers are cheap due to their age. This reduces profit-per-wafer for TSMC, which is a likely motivator for it to nudge its customers into a more modern node.
From TSMC’s perspective though, while customer pays more for a more advanced node, that move comes with obvious benefits. According to Zhang, some customers might question such a move when the 40nm chip works just fine. “I think the customer going to get a benefit, economic benefit, scaling benefit, you have a better power consumption,” he said. Summarizing it, he stated, “you go to a next node, you get a better performance and better power and overall you get a system level benefit.” The customers will also get a lot more dies per wafer as well.
TSMC previously announced it will be increasing its capacity for mature and speciality nodes 50 percent in the coming years. This effort will see the company focusing on 28nm nodes in particular. It’s announced plans to build a fab in Kumamoto, Japan that will focus on N12, N16, N22, and N28 nodes. It’s also manufacturing three more fabs to assist in this process. Two of those facilities will be in Taiwan, with the third in China.
The majority of chips made on older nodes go into smart appliances, phones, IoT, and especially cars. It’s estimated that in a few years cars will feature over 1,500 individual chips. Currently most cars only use several hundred chips. This was notably apparent as the pandemic-based chip shortage caused turmoil in the auto industry.
The Mercedes-Benz VISION EQXX concept car has beaten its own single-charge range record, thanks to a 747-mile trip last week.
In April, the company’s stab at “the silver bullet to the electric road trip” completed a 626-mile trip on a single charge. But after driving from Stuttgart, Germany to Cassis, France, the electric vehicle’s battery sat at about 15 percent capacity. This prompted the engineering team to wonder how much further the EV would be able to go.
Cue take two: a 14.5-hour trip that took the VISION EQXX from Stuttgart to Silverstone, UK across two days. The team strove to imitate real-world conditions as much as possible, enduring everyday challenges such as summer heat and high traffic density. Nyck “The Dutchman” de Vries, who races for the Mercedes-EQ Formula E team, conducted the end portion of the trip as a guest driver. De Vries took the VISION EQXX up to its maximum speed limit of 87 miles per hour during 11 trips around Silverstone’s famous race track before exhausting the vehicle’s charge on the pit lanes.
“Yet again, the VISION EQXX has proven that it can easily cover more than 1,000 km on a single battery charge, this time faced with a whole different set of real-world conditions,”saidMarkus Schäfer, Chief Technology Officer for development and procurement at Mercedes-Benz. “As Mercedes-Benz strives to go all-electric by 2030 wherever market conditions allow, it is important to show to the world what can be achieved in real terms through a combination of cutting-edge technology, teamwork and determination.”
(Photo: Mercedes-Benz)
Single-charge EV ranges floated around250 milesat the beginning of last year. Mercedes had to triple this median in order to bring the VISION EQXX to the level of success it saw last week. While the easy answer would’ve been to build a bigger battery, this would have weighed the vehicle down. Instead Mercedes tried its hand at using lightweight materials to create a unit that didn’t sacrifice size for capacity. The result was an energy-dense battery that was about 30 percent lighter than the one it started with, and half the size.
The battery doesn’t have to power the EV’s interior, either. Rooftop solar panels power most of the interior technology—which, by the way, makes the VISION EQXX look like something out of the 1964 New York World’s Fair. White seats, brushed steel accents, and cool-toned ambient lighting combine for a sleek aesthetic to match the vehicle’s impressive range. Mercedes says it used animal-free textiles, like cactus fibers, mushrooms and vegan silk, to craft the attractive yet practical interior.
The VISION EQXX is a concept vehicle and isn’t currently slated for production. That being said, the vehicle—which the company is calling “the most efficient Mercedes ever built”—presents a likely irresistible challenge to other EV makers, including Tesla, whose cars currently max out at about 400 miles on a single charge.
Most know by now that last week, the Supreme Court finalized its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark ruling that constitutionally protected the right to abortion. The product of the decision is a jumble of states with varying levels of protection and prosecution. But among people’s concerns regarding bodily autonomy, medical legal checks and balances, a new, insidious problem has quietly risen to the surface: health apps are using people’s grief and anxieties to market their products.
As many have pointed out, post-Roe America presents a complication that pre-Roe America did not: an unprecedented level of digital surveillance. Those seeking reproductive care in certain states now run the risk of being prosecuted by a court system that will subpoena service providers and software developers for any data that hints at a pregnancy. Ever since the Supreme Court’sRoedecision draft leaked last month, people have worried that digital period trackers (or health apps that otherwise contain a period-tracking feature) might reveal a blip in someone’s menstrual cycle, thus aiding abortion prosecution.
This, unfortunately, is a well-founded worry. Like wediscussedin May, digital evidence has already been recruited in court cases concerning reproductive autonomy. Most health apps, including period trackers, store user data outside of the user’s device. This means the end user doesn’t retain all control of their data. Companies can decide independently if they want to sell user information to data brokers, who often supply data to the government for both malevolent and well-intentioned purposes. And if the government comes knocking, the company—not the user—gets to decide whether to open the door.
So then it’s a matter of getting companies to promise not to open the door…right? Perhaps not. The world’s most powerful tech companies are refusing to say whether they’ll continue their relationships with historied data brokers or respond to law enforcement subpoenas related to reproductive care. In light of the Supreme Court’s decision, Vice’s Motherboardaskeda number of social media, telecommunications, digital finance, and rideshare companies if they will “provide data in response to requests from law enforcement if the case concerns users seeking or providing abortions.” Included were Apple, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Google, Amazon, Discord, and Uber. None of the companies provided an answer.
Tech in general can be very “monkey say, monkey do.” If major apps and networks were to pledge not to share data with law enforcement when reproductive freedom is on the line, one could argue others, including smaller software developers, would do the same. Instead companies seem to be nervous to lead by example, electing to wait for someone else to pipe up—and likely make some measure of financial sacrifice—first. And until that happens (and companies actually follow through on their promises), it’s impossible to rely on any measure of health data integrity.
Meanwhile, smaller health app developers have seen a marketing opportunity in post-Roe anxiety. Stardust, a period tracking smartphone app that advertises itself as “women-owned, privacy-first,” quickly came up with a “hands off our bodies, hands off our data” marketing campaign over the weekend. A majority of the app’s security messaging centers around end-to-end data encryption. But the app’s social media managers have ignored (and even deleted) comments asking whether Stardust will hand over data to law enforcement or work with data brokers: two practices that would essentially render the app’s so-called security promises moot. Stardust became the most-downloaded free app on iOS in the days immediately following the Supreme Court’s decision, despite its privacy policy stating it would comply with law enforcement data requests. ExtremeTech attempted to reach Stardust for comment regarding its marketing, potential relationships with data brokers, and any potential amendments to its policy. Stardust didn’t respond.
Stardust turned off comments on its Instagram post about data security, for reasons we can’t quite imagine.
GP Apps, the developer behind the Period Tracker app, has similarly attempted to appeal to those anxious aboutRoe’s overturn (though with less of an activist tilt). It recently put out astatementassuring users that it wouldnotwork with law enforcement on abortion prosecutions. “We want to assure our users that we are adamantly opposed to government overreach and we believe that a hypothetical situation where the government subpoenas private user data from health apps to convict people for having an abortion is a gross human rights violation. In such a scenario, we will do all we can to protect our users from such an act,” the statement reads. Further down it explains that users have a choice to use the app offline, thus keeping data local. Still, the app’s privacy policy generally says it will comply with subpoenas and other legal requests. Right now it’s unclear whether Period Tracker intends on amending the official policy, and it’s unlikely that a public statement would carry as much legal weight as a privacy policy. (One thing’s for sure: an Instagram post would not.)
It’s a harsh lesson in media literacy. Until companies begin writing reproductive choice protection into their privacy policies, only rigorous, sophisticated external testing can reveal whether their apps are truly safe post-Roe. Without that, period trackers and other health apps can’t be considered truly secure—no matter what they’ve posted online or said at a press conference.
Some hope legislation will help fill in the gaps. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently spearheaded theHealth and Location Protection Act, which would ban the sale of all location and health data. The ban was specifically proposed in light of mounting worries regarding reproductive data privacy. Still, if the bill passes, it will only prevent companies from giving up user data in exchange for money; it will have nothing to do with private entities’ willingness to share information with law enforcement.
Are the newfound risks associated with health apps worth the occasional convenience? Like many things, that’s up for individual users to decide. But as they currently stand, most health apps can’t entirely be trusted to keep user data private, and the stakes of a slip-up have never been higher. In keeping with the archaic theme, it might be best to stick to a pencil and paper.
You have to assume that Twitter regrets giving up on Vine so soon — TikTok, which focuses on similar bite-sized videos, is one of the most popular apps in the world today with more than a billion monthly active users. That could be a problem, according to FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr. In an open letter to Apple and Google, Carr calls TikTok a “serious national security threat” and asks that the companies remove it from their app stores. The statement doesn’t carry any legal authority, but it could be a sign that the tide is turning against TikTok.
The dispute traces back to agreements TikTok made with US regulators during the Trump administration. The then-president had a lot to say about TikTok, most of it involving the privacy impact of having a Chinese-owned app collecting so much user data. After threats to ban the app over concerns the Chinese government had access to its data, TikTok’s US arm pledged to keep US data away from the Chinese mothership.
It seems, however, that TikTok never followed through on that promise. Last week, Buzzfeed reported on a series of leaked recordings in which China-based TikTok employees talk about their access to American user data. It is this report that Carr cites as the rationale for dropping the app from the Play Store and App Store.
In the recordings, the employees are mostly discussing “Project Texas,” which is the initiative to segregate US data in an Oracle data center (in Texas, obviously). TikTok says it does not keep any US data in China, but the recordings prove that Chinese employees still have access to that data, which seems to run afoul of the promises made to regulators. Carr, one of two Republican members of the Federal Communications Commission, notes that TikTok is known to collect clipboard data, draft messages, device identifiers, and keystroke patterns.
TikTok is not just another video app.
That’s the sheep’s clothing.
It harvests swaths of sensitive data that new reports show are being accessed in Beijing.
While Carr is a Republican, distrust of Chinese tech giants is one of the few issues that crosses party lines. For example, Trump came down hard on Huawei for its alleged ties to the Chinese government, and the Biden administration has not sought to ease those restrictions. If Carr is coming out strongly against TikTok, it may only be a matter of time before Google and Apple are forced to act.
TikTok has not made any new statements on this latest twist. Previously, it sidestepped discussing the core of the Buzzfeed report with a non-denial denial. The secrecy is not working in its favor if a member of the FCC has resorted to public saber-rattling. In the event of a ban, Android users could still sideload the app (at increased security risk), but iPhone folks would be out of luck. If the US went as far as to block access to the service, you’d need a VPN to get your TikTok dance fix.
