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Just saw the news after the holiday. Curiosity found firm clue that Mars may harbor life somewhere under its shell. Scientists confirmed that the rover found sources of methane coming our from the underground. The scientists are not sure about the source, but 95 percent of methane (CH4) here in Earth is produced by various lifeforms. The discovery was reported at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting. “It is one of the few hypotheses that we can propose that we must consider as we go forward,” said John P. Grotzinger, the mission’s project scientist.The scientists also reported that for the first time, they had confirmed the presence of carbon-based organic molecules in a rock sample. The so-called organics are not direct signs of life, past or present, but they lend weight to the possibility that Mars had the ingredients required for life, and may even still have them. Full news at NY Times, BBC.

Google researchers have written the first-ever attack code that takes advantage of electrical interference between densely packed memory cells, a unique style of attack that could require changes in chip design. The work builds on a paper published last year by Carnegie Mellon University and Intel, which found it was possible to change binary values in stored memory by repeatedly accessing nearby memory cells, a process called “bit flipping.” DRAM memory is vulnerable to such electrical interference because the cells are so closely packed together, a result of engineers increasing a chip’s memory capacity. Chipmakers have known about electrical interference, but may have viewed it as a reliability issue rather than a security problem, wrote Mark Seaborn, a Google software engineer. Google’s work shows bit flipping can have a much larger impact. They tested 29 x86-based laptops manufactured between 2010 and last year and found some vulnerable. All of the laptops, which were not identified by make and model, used DDR3 DRAM. source : http://www.pcworld.com/article/2896032/google-researchers-hack-computers-using-dram-electrical-leaks.html