Month: March 2022

Enlarge (credit: Mandiant)

Google has announced a massive $5.4 billion deal to acquire the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, Inc. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval, but Google says it expects the deal to close later this year. If it goes through, it would be Google’s second-largest acquisition ever, slotting in between the $12.5 billion deal for Motorola Mobility and the $3.2 billion purchase of Nest. Mandiant will join the Google Cloud division.

Mandiant was founded in 2004 and does security consultancy and threat research. It makes an automated threat-monitoring system called the “Mandiant Advantage Platform.” Mandiant was a key researcher investigating many of the world’s biggest security incidents, like the SolarWinds supply-chain attack, the Log4j vulnerability, and the Pulse Secure VPN vulnerabilities.

Google has a ton of experience securing its own cloud. Besides bulking up Google’s security staff on its home turf, the goal of this deal is to bring more of that security know-how onsite with security consultancy services. The blog post lays out what the full Google Cloud security offering will look like:

Enlarge / Eagle Plume Tower in Bears Ears, Utah. Geologists at the University of Utah have developed a mathematical model to predict the fundamental resonant frequencies of this and similar formations based on the formations’ geometry and material properties. (credit: Geohazards Research Group)

The striking red rock towers and arch formations peppered throughout Southern Utah and the Colorado Plateau are known to shake and sway in response to earthquakes, high winds, thermal stresses, and other sources of vibration, such as those from helicopters, trains, passing vehicles, and blasts. Being able to assess the stability of these structures, and detect any damage from vibrations, can be challenging. That’s why geologists have been measuring the natural frequencies of these towers for several years now.

Led by University of Utah geologist Jeff Moore, the group of geologists maintains an entire webpage devoted to its seismic recordings of the natural resonances (vibrations) that come out of the Utah red rock towers and arches. The geologists have now used that data set to develop a theory that can predict the frequencies at which these formations vibrate and deform, described in a recent paper published in the journal Seismological Research Letters.

Overcoming hurdles

As we’ve reported previously, understanding those dynamics is crucial to being able to predict how the structures will respond in the event of an earthquake or similar disruption. Yet, there haven’t been many ongoing efforts to do so over the years, despite a great deal of research on manmade civil structures. One of the major challenges has been gaining the access necessary to make those vibrational measurements in the first place. Either the formations are restricted (the better to preserve them for posterity), or it’s simply too difficult to place sensors in hard-to-reach spots on the formations.

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Winz)

Throughout the lifetime of an average tire, 30 percent of it gets eroded away as cars zip around on city streets and brake for little old ladies. But the leftover particles don’t remain as streaks on a road. One study found that 1.5 million metric tons of this tire debris end up flowing out into the environment as microplastics or their diminutive cousins, nanoplastics.

Some of these tiny bits of tire—made up of synthetic rubber, oils, filling agents, etc.—end up in rivers and estuaries. And according to two new research papers, these bits can wreak havoc among the fish and invertebrates living in those bodies of water. According to Susanne M. Brander, an assistant professor at Oregon State University’s Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences Department, much of the current research on microplastics on wildlife deals with the particles that come from a few different types of commercial plastics. Further, this field focuses more on microplastics—defined as anything under 5 millimeters—but “much less is known about nano-plastics,” she told Ars.

The researchers found that the presence of microplastics, nanoplastics, and the accompanying leachate—the chemicals released from them—hindered aquatic species’ ability to grow and impacted their swimming behavior, potentially making them more susceptible to predation.

Enlarge / LG’s 5K UltraFine is currently the closest thing to a 5K version of the old Thunderbolt Display. But Apple could change that sometime this year. (credit: LG)

It has been a long, sad decade for fans of Apple’s first-party external monitors.

Apple’s 2011 Thunderbolt Display was unceremoniously discontinued back in 2016 without being replaced. The 4K and 5K LG UltraFine displays that Apple will still sell you aren’t bad—the 5K option is still one of the only 5K monitors that even exists, and the devices have modern Thunderbolt 3 ports, USB hubs, built-in webcams, and decent display panels. But their thick, ugly bezels and boxy black designs are hardly a good aesthetic match for Apple’s sleek, silvery hardware. And then there’s the ProDisplay XDR, an unapologetically expensive screen that can cost between two and six times as much as the Mac you’re connecting it to.

But Mac multimonitor enthusiasts haven’t given up hope, and rumors have persisted that Apple is getting back into the displays-a-normal-person-could-conceivably-afford market. The latest iteration of these rumors comes via correct-more-often-than-not Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. He says (via MacRumors) that Apple is planning a new, “more affordable” 27-inch display and may be planning to release the display alongside a more powerful version of the Mac mini at some point in 2022.