Technology companies are rushing to fix two major flaws in popular computer chips. Businesses and consumers can protect against one of them if they keep their software up-to-date with patches. The other? It’s not so easy.
Credit Sascha Steinbach/European Pressphoto Agency
On Wednesday, a group of security experts revealed two security flaws that affect nearly all microprocessors, the digital brains of the world’s computers. These flaws, called Meltdown and Spectre, could allow hackers to lift passwords, photos, documents and other data from smartphones, PCs and the cloud computing services that many businesses rely on.
Some of the world’s largest tech companies have been working on fixes for these problems. But the researchers who discovered the flaws said one of them, Spectre, is not completely fixable. “It is a fundamental flaw in the way processors have been built over the last decades,” said Paul Kocher, one of the researchers who discovered these flaws.
Here is a guide to what […]
More than 25 percent of the Earth will experience serious drought and desertification by the year 2050 if global warming is not curbed, according to a new study by the journal Nature Climate Change.
Credit: AFP
More than 25 percent of the Earth will experience serious drought and desertification by the year 2050 if the attempts made by the Paris climate agreement to curb global warming are not met, according to a new study by the journal Nature Climate Change. (emphasis added)
The study, which was published on Monday, claims that if the Earth’s average yearly temperature is raised by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in the next 32 years, the areas of the world experiencing “aridification,” or drying of the planet, will increase.
“Our research predicts that aridification would emerge over about 20 to 30 percent of the world’s land surface by the time the global mean temperature change reaches 2 degrees Celsius,” said Manoj Joshi, the lead researcher of the study. “But two-thirds of the affected regions could avoid significant aridification if […]
New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo
Credit: Bryan Bedder
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) will reconvene a science advisory panel shut down by the Trump administration.
New York, along with other states involved in a climate policy network to counterattack the federal government’s retreat on carbon regulation, will reconstitute the federal advisory committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment. Cuomo will announce the move today during his annual State of the State speech in Albany. The committee includes academics, corporate representatives and other stakeholders.
In August, the Trump administration notified members of the advisory committee that the group was being dissolved. The panel was tasked with translating dozens of studies and scientific revelations that constitute the National Climate Assessment into policy actions that states could use to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The resuscitated committee will be limited in its reach. The coalition of states can’t replace federal support for science, including maintaining satellites and building better climate models, said Richard Moss, the committee’s chairman and a researcher at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Previously, the […]
Beneath the waves, oxygen disappears
As plastic waste pollutes the oceans and fish stocks decline, unseen below the surface another problem grows: deoxygenation. Breitburg et al. review the evidence for the downward trajectory of oxygen levels in increasing areas of the open ocean and coastal waters. Rising nutrient loads coupled with climate change—each resulting from human activities—are changing ocean biogeochemistry and increasing oxygen consumption. This results in destabilization of sediments and fundamental shifts in the availability of key nutrients. In the short term, some compensatory effects may result in improvements in local fisheries, such as in cases where stocks are squeezed between the surface and elevated oxygen minimum zones. In the longer term, these conditions are unsustainable and may result in ecosystem collapses, which ultimately will cause societal and economic harm.
Science, this issue p. eaam7240
Oxygen concentrations in both the open ocean and coastal waters have been declining since at least the middle of the 20th century. This oxygen loss, or deoxygenation, is one of the most important […]
There’s good and bad news when it comes to infant mortality in the United States.
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
