Nose pickers are often said to be digging for gold. But a 48-year-old Australian man needed an entirely different kind of nugget mined from his schnoz.
Doctors excavated from the man's right nasal cavity a 19mm×11 mm rock-hard mass—the calcified remains of a small amount of marijuana he tried to smuggle into prison a startling 18 years earlier.
The man's nose stone—reported this month in the journal BMJ Case Reports—is a rare example of illicit drugs causing a rhinolith, which are rare on their own. Rhinoliths are stone-like concretions formed by the gradual buildup of salts around things not normally found in the nose. The term rhinolith comes from the Greek rhino (meaning nose) and lithos (meaning stone). They're estimated to show up in 1 out of 10,000 outpatient visits to an ear, nose, and throat doctor.
Enlarge/ A video surveillance camera hangs from the side of a building on May 14, 2019, in San Francisco, California. (credit: Justin Sullivan | Getty Images)
The use of facial recognition has spread from photo albums and social media to airports, doorbells, schools, and law enforcement. Now, the American Civil Liberties Union wants top US agencies to share records detailing what face data they're collecting and what they're doing with it.
The ACLU in January submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the FBI seeking records relating to the agencies' "use of face recognition programs and other biometric identification and tracking technology." Almost 10 months later, the ACLU has received no response. And so the organization today filed suit against all three agencies, seeking the records.
The records are "important to assist the public in understanding the government's use of highly invasive biometric identification and tracking technologies," says the complaint, filed in federal court in Massachusetts. Through the records, the ACLU seeks to "understand and inform the public about, among other things, how face recognition and other biometric identification technologies are currently being used by the government and what, if any, safeguards are currently in place to prevent their abuse and protect core constitutional rights."
While those of us stuck sailing desks might not be able to truly appreciate the problem, [Timo Birnschein] was tired of finding that some of the batteries aboard his boat had gone flat. He wanted some way to check the voltage on all of the the batteries in the system simultaneously and display the information in a central location, and not liking anything on the commercial market he decided to build it himself.
Even for those who don’t hear the call of the sea, this is a potentially useful project. Any system that has multiple batteries could benefit from a central monitor that can show you voltages at a glance, but [Timo] is actually going one better than that. With the addition of a nRF24 module, the battery monitor will also be able to wireless transmit the status of the batteries to…something. He actually hasn’t implemented that feature yet, but some way of getting the data into the computer so it can be graphed over time seems like a natural application.
The bill of materials is pretty short on this one. Beyond the aforementioned nRF24 module, the current version of the monitor features an Arduino Nano clone, a 128×160 SPI TFT display, and a handful of passives.
Knowing that a perfboard wouldn’t last long on the high seas, [Timo] even routed his own PCB for this project. We suspect there’s some kind of watertight enclosure in this board’s future, but it looks like things are still in the early phases. It will be interesting to follow along with this one and see how it eventually gets integrated in to the boat’s electrical system.
John Capra, a research scientist at Vanderbilt University, wants to know how evolution has shaped our genomes and how differences in genetics can account for differences in species. In his latest work, he tries to get a better sense of what ancient humans—Neanderthals and Denisovans—may have been like. This has been difficult because there is only so much that scientists can glean about biological traits from fossils and DNA. And it's not much.
Capra's new study takes advantage of the fact that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans (yes, Jean Auel was a prescient genius). Collectively, we have about a third of the Neanderthal genome scattered across our cells' nuclei, or at least Eurasian populations do. Most of this Neanderthal DNA is in regions that don't encode proteins, a category that includes gene regulatory regions that dictate where, when, and how much a gene is expressed.
Ancient vs. modern
Much of the Neanderthal DNA that has been retained in the modern genome influences the immune system, hair and skin, and neurological development. But to figure out which genetic regions have divergent regulatory effects in ancient and modern humans, Capra's lab didn't look at the Neanderthal DNA sequences that modern humans got. It looked at the sequences we didn't get.
On January 12, 2017, president-elect Donald Trump named Rudy Giuliani to be his cybersecurity advisor. A month later, on February 7, Giuliani walked into a San Francisco Apple store with a problem: his iPhone had gotten locked down after 10 unsuccessful passcode attempts, NBC reports.
iPhones are designed to become permanently inaccessible after 10 failed login attempts. Rudy—who is now Trump's personal lawyer—had little choice but to wipe the phone and start over.
"Proceeded with DFU [device firmware update] restore and will set up the phone again from a current iCloud backup,”" an Apple store employee wrote in Apple's internal database.
Behold the Moto Razr. Supposedly. Man, it is dark in here. [credit: Evan Blass ]
Motorola is resurrecting the Razr phone on November 13, with official invites already out there for the press. No launch happens without the Internet getting an early peek into the proceedings, and today we're getting news from venerable leaker Evan Blass and the Dutch site Mobielkopen, which both independently dropped Razr images on the Web today.
First off, well, the phone looks like a Razr. The device has the form factor of a clamshell flip phone. When closed, there's a small screen on the front and a camera bump for the primary lens. The Razr's trademark chin is back, and this time it houses what looks to be a fingerprint reader on the front and a USB-C port on the bottom edge. Disappointingly, there is no fully-exposed picture of the inside of the device, but the pictures do confirm this as a flexible display phone, since you can just barely make out a continuous, top-to-bottom display in one photo.
A lot about these images is suspicious though, and I don't mean their authenticity. I'm talking about Motorola's exact plans for the foldable Razr phone. A foldable Razr phone is supposed to be unveiled next month, right? So then why are these images so... mysterious? Usually, leaked images are official media produced by the phone manufacturer meant for promotional use on places like their website or on retail sites. These leaked Galaxy Note 10 images from July are a good example: you get straightforward, brightly lit photos that show the phone in all its glory, from every angle. After all, the phone is a real thing, for sale, so there's no need for an air of mystery anymore.
We all know how important bees are to our ecosystems and [Kris Winer]’s bee monitor provides a great way to monitor these amazing but delicate creature’s habitats, hopefully alerting us before a disaster strikes a vital hive.
The board is based around LoRa sensor tile called Cicada but redesigned to make it smaller and cheaper. LoRa is a popular low-power wide-area network running on sub-Ghz bands designed exactly for applications like this. This board has a nice suite of sensors. It can detect UVA, UVB, and the visible spectrum of light. It can also observe the temperature, pressure, and humidity. Importantly for bees, the accelerometer can detect the various vibrations of the hive as well as disaster events like vandalism.
The data is all logged into a Cayenne dashboard which the prospective farmer could view and analyze from anywhere. [Kris] mentions that the board is relatively easy to re-spin with a different sensor suite depending on the application. Technology like this can go along way towards a more sustainable future.
Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of discounts and price drops. Today's list is headlined by a deal on the 128GB variant of Apple's 6th-gen iPad, which is down to $299 at Walmart as of this writing. That matches the price we saw during Amazon's Prime Day event, and this price tag comes in about $30 below the typical price we've seen whenever the tablet's been discounted in the past year.
The big caveat here is that Apple recently replaced this iPad with a new model, which starts at $329 for a 32GB model. That 7th-gen iPad bumps up the screen size from 9.7 inches to 10.2 inches and adds support for Apple's Smart Connector port, meaning it can use Apple's Smart Keyboard accessory instead of solely relying on Bluetooth keyboards. It also bumps up the RAM from 2GB to 3GB.
Other than that, though, this older model performs almost identically to the new one. It has the same A10 processor, the same camera and battery specs, the same Lightning port and 3.5mm headphone jack, and the same iPadOS software. It's also saddled with the same non-laminated display and relatively dated design. Springing more for an iPad Air (or a refurbished 10.5-inch iPad Pro) will bring you a noticeable hardware upgrade, the 10.2-inch iPad may grant you an extra year of iPadOS support down the road, and it's always possible Black Friday will bring prices down further. But if you just want an affordable iPad and value the extra storage, this is a good value.
Enlarge/ A two-car crash may now involve as many as four drivers, not all of them human. (credit: MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images )
Tonight, drivers in the US will kill more pedestrians than any other night of the year. An increase in people walking in low-light conditions makes Halloween the most dangerous night of the year for pedestrians.
Pedestrian deaths are on the rise overall, as cars become safer for drivers but more dangerous for everyone else. Sophisticated pedestrian detection systems, which are becoming more common in cars, aren't doing particularly well. Some of them score highly on easier tests in broad daylight, but they do not fare so well in more difficult conditions like low light.
When a driver shares the blame for a pedestrian death with an automated car, how do people assign blame? A study in Nature Human Behaviour this week suggests that people may focus their ire on the human in a shared-control situation. The authors argue that this could result in an under-regulation of the safety of shared-control vehicles.
Enlarge/ A woman possibly infringing two USAA patents. (credit: Hero Images / Getty)
In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that you can't get a patent for implementing an otherwise abstract idea on a computer. The decision, known as CLS Bank v. Alice, has had a big impact over the last five years, invalidating a lot of broad software patents.
But a ruling this week illustrates the limits of that landmark ruling. The confusingly named United States Automobile Association, which provides insurance and other financial products, sued Wells Fargo for infringing two patents on the concept of cashing checks with a mobile device. Wells Fargo argued that the patents were abstract—and therefore invalid—under the Alice rule.
Through the weekend Twitter has been a-titter with news coming out of Saintcon, the annual security conference in Provo, Utah. Now that the weekend is over we can finally get our hands on full hardware and software sources for the curvy, LED-covered badge we’ve been salivating over and a write up by its creators [compukidmike] and [bashNinja]. Let’s dive in and see what’s waiting!
Design
This year’s badge is designed to represent a single tooth on a single rotor of an Enigma machine. The full function of an Enigma machine is quite complex, but an individual device has three rotors with 26 teeth each (one for each letter) as well as a keypad for input and a character display to show each enciphered letter. For reference, the back of the badge has a handy diagram of a badge’s place in the Enigma system.
Reminiscent of the WWII device which the badge design recalls, each unit includes a full QWERTZ keyboard (with labeled keys!) and RGB “lampboard” for individual character output, but unlike the original there’s also a curved 16 x 64 RGB LED display made from those beguiling little ~1mm x 1mm LEDs. All in, the device includes 1051 LEDs! Combined with the unusually non-rectilinear shape of the badge and the Enigma-style Saintcon logo it makes for an attractive, cohesive look.
The inside of the sandwich. Top on left (flipped over), bottom on right.
Tech Specs
Fortunately for the chiropractic needs of the Saintcon attendees the badge creators opted not to make the chassis out of wood like the original. Instead it’s formed from the increasingly common “sandwich of PCBAs” method, and it’s quite a sandwich indeed! The upper PCBA is mostly dedicated to that delightful RGB display and its supporting hardware. At the top of the image you can see the Lattice ICE40HX1K FPGA and 12 shift registers needed to address the matrix. It looks like they decided that there wasn’t a suitable LED controller which would support so many channels and rolled their own. The FPGA speaks an SPI interface which was designed to be fairly similar to the one used by those big LED matrix panels which have become popular recently, and the system is constrained to updating the display at 30 FPS to avoid LED driver-related ghosting. Of course, you choose an ICE40 FPGA because of its excellent open source toolchain support, and during development Icestudio’s GUI based visual tools were a big help.
The lower PCBA holds the rest of the badge’s magic. The main CPU is a Cortex-M4 based STM32L433 in a 100 pin package. They had been contemplating a smaller part but the features kept creeping until they used every pin! Looking at the design, some of those pin assignments came from the keyboard which was individually connected instead of scanned in a matrix, but even so they did use a controller for the RGB LEDs on the lampboard. All in all the lower board may look more complex, but the more complex schematic is definitely the upper!
But what about those big connectors along the bottom of the badge? In addition to three rotors the original Enigma machine included a plugboard which would swap pairs of letters as the operator pressed them. Of course, in the name of accuracy, the Saintcon badge has a plugboard too! Thus the headers on the sides.
And the middle connector? It wouldn’t be a Saintcon badge without minibadges, so of course that’s for the minibadge adapter! Brian Benchoff may have been off flogging the standards committee to ratify the expanded SAO 1.69bis addon standard in 2019, but back in 2017 [compukidmike] and friends designed the dual header form factor you see here. While an “SAO” only specified a connector, the minibadge standard specifies the entire minibadge, which makes it possible to design holders which display them more like scouting patches to commemorate awards or accomplishments. Different groups and events at Saintcon give out minibadges to display membership or show off achievement, so the badge needed a way to display them.
For a fairly exotic example of what a minibadge can become check out this one we covered recently from [hamster] which drives VFD tubes!
The Badge Challenge
Faces redacted for privacy
As with many conferences, the Saintcon badge creators included a challenge which was designed to force conference-goers to interact. Everything from the software to the physical shape of the badge encourages this behavior. What do you do with a badge that’s a single tooth of a 26 tooth rotor? Connect it to 25 friends of course!
Each attendee got a set of operating instructions similar to those of a real Enigma machine, and a snippet of enciphered code (with German flavor text of course). By properly configuring their rotor tooth and connecting to other appropriately configured badges, full messages could be deciphered together on the massive 27,326 pixel, 16 x 1664 RGB display.
If you want to make one of these beasts yourself check out the Github repo linked at the top. It includes full hardware, software, and HDL sources for both PCBAs. If you’re thinking of hand assembly we might suggest trying a solder paste stencil; those minuscule LEDs are just begging to be soldered with one.
If (like us!) you enjoy some inside baseball, check out the full write up for details about BOM cost, scope creep, manufacturing, and all your favorite PCBA-related war stories. Overall it sounds like most of the problems were overcome to produce a badge only somewhat over budget, but fully functional for attendees! That sounds like success in our book. This post covered only a fraction of the detail [compukidmike] included in the original, so be sure to take a look at that for more detail.
If the spoken word is more your style, we embedded his badge talk below.
