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Startup Offers To Sequence Your Genome Free Of Charge, Then Let You Profit From It
npr.org"Everything is private information, stored on your computer or a computer you designate," says George Church, genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, about the approach of Nebula Genomics.
Craig Barritt/Getty Images for The New Yorker A startup genetics company says it's now offering to sequence your entire genome at no cost to you. In fact, you would own the data and may even be able to make money off it.
Nebula Genomics, created by the prominent Harvard geneticist George Church and his lab colleagues, seeks to upend the usual way genomic information is owned.
Today, companies like 23andMe make some of their money by scanning your genetic patterns and then selling that information to drug companies for use in research. (You choose whether to opt in.)
Church says his new enterprise leaves ownership and control of the data in an individual's hands. And the genomic analysis Nebula will perform is much more detailed than what 23andMe and similar companies offer.
Nebula will do a full genome sequence, rather than a snapshot of key gene variants. That wider range of genetic information would makes the data more appealing to biologists and biotech and pharmaceutical companies.
Generating a full sequence costs about $1,000, but the price continues to tumble, Church says. Nebula's business model anticipates that companies and research organizations would be willing to pay for the cost of sequencing, if in exchange they also get some key medical information about the person involved. If that proves to be the case, people would get their genetic information at no cost.
Article continues after this message from our sponsor The company hopes most people will pony up $99 to get the process going. "Ninety-nine bucks will get you a little bit of genetic information, but to get the full thing, [companies or researchers] will have to be interested in either your traits or your genome or both," Church says.
My Grandmother Was Italian. Why Aren't My Genes Italian?In fact, people might even make money on the deal, especially if they have an unusual trait that a company wants to study. Those payments could be "probably anywhere from $10 to $10,000, if you're some exceptional research resource," Church says.
And it's not just people with diseases who could be of value to pharmaceutical companies. "Even people who seem to be healthy, they might be super healthy and not even know it," he says.
Church's approach is part of a trend that's pushing back against the multibillion-dollar industry to buy and sell medical information. Right now, companies reap those profits and control the data.
"Patients should have the right to decide for themselves whether they want to share their medical data, and, if so, with whom," Adam Tanner, at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science, says in an email. "Efforts to empower people to fine-tune the fate of their medical information are a step in the right direction." Tanner, author of a book on the subject of the trade in medical data, isn't involved in Nebula.
The current system is "very paternalistic," Church says. He aims to give people complete control over who gets access to their data, and let individuals decide whether or not to sell the information, and to whom.
"In this case, everything is private information, stored on your computer or a computer you designate," Church says. It can be encrypted so nobody can read it, even you, if that's what you want.
Drug companies interested in studying, say, diabetes patients would ask Nebula to identify people in their system who have the disease. Nebula would then identify those individuals by launching an encrypted search of participants.
People who have indicated they're interested in selling their genetic data to a company would then be given the option of granting access to the information, along with medical data that person has designated.
Other companies are also springing up to help people control — and potentially profit from — their medical data. EncrypGen lets people offer up their genetic data, though customers have to provide their own DNA sequence. Hu-manity.co is also trying to establish a system in which people can sell their medical data to pharmaceutical companies.
Church, a genetics pioneer, has also developed other business models before. The Personal Genome Project allows people to donate their genome and health data to help speed medical research. Veritas Geneticscharges $1,000 to produce a complete genome, and provides the resulting medical information to people along with genetic counseling.
Church has been trying to accelerate research into health and disease through these efforts. Jason Bobe, a geneticist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, says one bottleneck has been getting people to participate in research. (Bobe has collaborated with Church but isn't involved in Nebula Genomics.)
With more control over personal data, and the possibility of a personal financial return, "I'm hopeful that this model will actually attract people, where historically people have been very disinterested in participation in research."
The greatest hardware hacks of all time were simply the result of finding software keys in memory. The AACS encryption debacle — the 09 F9 key that allowed us to decrypt HD DVDs — was the result of encryption keys just sitting in main memory, where it could be read by any other program. DeCSS, the hack that gave us all access to DVDs was again the result of encryption keys sitting out in the open.
Because encryption doesn’t work if your keys are just sitting out in the open, system designers have come up with ingenious solutions to prevent evil hackers form accessing these keys. One of the best solutions is the hardware enclave, a tiny bit of silicon that protects keys and other bits of information. Apple has an entire line of chips, Intel has hardware extensions, and all of these are black box solutions. They do work, but we have no idea if there are any vulnerabilities. If you can’t study it, it’s just an article of faith that these hardware enclaves will keep working.
Now, there might be another option. RISC-V researchers are busy creating an Open Source hardware enclave. This is an Open Source project to build secure hardware enclaves to store cryptographic keys and other secret information, and they’re doing it in a way that can be accessed and studied. Trust but verify, yes, and that’s why this is the most innovative hardware development in the last decade.
What is an enclave?Although as a somewhat new technology, processor enclaves have been around for ages. The first one to reach the public consciousness would be the Secure Enclave Processor (SEP) found in the iPhone 5S. This generation of iPhone introduced several important technological advancements, including Touch ID, the innovative and revolutionary M7 motion coprocessor, and the SEP security coprocessor itself. The iPhone 5S was a technological milestone, and the new at the time SEP stored fingerprint data and cryptographic keys beyond the reach of the actual SOC found in the iPhone.
The iPhone 5S SEP was designed to perform secure services for the rest of the SOC, primarily relating to the Touch ID functionality. Apple’s revolutionary use of a secure enclave processor was extended with the 2016 release of the Touch Bar MacBook Pro and the use of the Apple T1 chip. The T1 chip was again used for TouchID functionality, and demonstrates that Apple is the king of vertical integration.
But Apple isn’t the only company working on secure enclaves for their computing products. Intel has developed the SGX extension which allows for hardware-assisted security enclaves. These enclaves give developers the ability to hide cryptographic keys and the components for digital rights management inside a hardware-protected bit of silicon. AMD, too, has hardware enclaves with the Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). ARM has Trusted Execution environments. While the Intel, AMD, and ARM enclaves are bits of silicon on other bits of silicon — distinct from Apple’s approach of putting a hardware enclave on an entirely new chip — the idea remains the same. You want to put secure stuff in secure environments, and enclaves allow you to do that.
Unfortunately, these hardware enclaves are black boxes, and while they do provide a small attack surface, there are problems. AMD’s SEV is already known to have serious security weaknesses, and it is believed SEV does not offer protection from malicious hypervisors, only from accidental hypervisor vulnerabilities. Intel’s Management engine, while not explicitly a hardware enclave, has been shown to be vulnerable to attack. The problem is that these hardware enclaves are black boxes, and security through obscurity does not work at all.
The Open Source SolutionAt last week’s RISC-V Summit, researchers at UC Berkeley released their plans for the Keystone Enclave, an Open Source secure enclave based on the RISC-V (PDF). Keystone is a project to build a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) with secure hardware enclaves based on the RISC-V architecture, the same architecture that’s going into completely Open Source microcontrollers and (soon) Systems on a Chip.
The goals of the Keystone project are to build a chain of trust, starting from a silicon Root of Trust stored in tamper-proof hardware. this leads to a Zeroth-stage bootloader and a tamper-proof platform key store. Defining a hardware Root of Trust (RoT) is exceptionally difficult; you can always decapsulate silicon, you can always perform some sort of analysis on a chip to extract keys, and if your supply chain isn’t managed well, you have no idea if the chip you’re basing your RoT on is actually the chip in your computer. However, by using RISC-V and its Open Source HDL, this RoT can at least be studied, unlike the black box solutions from Intel, AMD, and ARM vendors.
The current plans for Keystone include memory isolation, an open framework for building on top of this security enclave, and a minimal but Open Source solution for a security enclave.
Right now, the Keystone Enclave is testable on various platforms, including QEMU, FireSim, and on real hardware with the SiFive Unleashed. There’s still much work to do, from formal verification to building out the software stack, libraries, and adding hardware extensions.
This is a game changer for security. Silicon vendors and designers have been shoehorning in hardware enclaves into processors for nearly a decade now, and Apple has gone so far as to create their own enclave chips. All of these solutions are black boxes, and there is no third-party verification that these designs are inherently correct. The RISC-V project is different, and the Keystone Enclave is the best chance we have for creating a truly Open hardware enclave that can be studied and verified independently.
Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Joseph M. Hellerstein, Jose Faleiro, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Johann Schleier-Smith, Vikram Sreekanti, Alexey Tumanov and Chenggang Wu UC Berkeley {hellerstein,jmfaleiro,jegonzal,jssmith,vikrams,atumanov,cgwu}@berkeley.edu
ABSTRACT Serverless computing offers the potential to program the cloud in an autoscaling, pay-as-you go manner. In this paper we address critical gaps in first-generation serverless computing, which place its autoscaling potential at odds with dominant trends in modern computing: notably data-centric and distributed computing, but also open source and custom hardware. Put together, these gaps make current serverless offerings a bad fit for cloud innovation and particularly bad for data systems innovation. In addition to pinpointing some of the main shortfalls of current serverless architectures, we raise a set of challenges we believe must be met to unlock the radical potential that the cloud—with its exabytes of storage and millions of cores—should offer to innovative developers.
·1; Rotary-Turbo-InFlow Tech / - GEARTURBINE PROJECT Have the similar basic system of the Aeolipilie Heron Steam Turbine device from Alexandria 10-70 AD * With Retrodynamic = DextroRPM VS LevoInFlow + Ying Yang Way Power Type - Non Waste Looses *8X/Y Thermodynamic CYCLE Way Steps. 4 Turbos, Higher efficient percent. No blade erosion by sand & very low heat target signature Pat:197187IMPI MX Dic1991 Atypical Motor Engine Type.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is expected to kick off volume production of chips built using an enhanced 7nm with EUV node at the end of March, according to industry sources.
ASML, which provides extreme ultraviolet (EUV) litho equipment, is looking to ship a total of 30 EUV systems in 2019. Of the units to be shipped, 18 have already been reserved by TSMC, the sources indicated.
TSMC is also on track to move a newer 5nm node to risk production in the second quarter of 2019, the sources noted. The foundry will fully incorporate EUV in the 5nm node.
TSMC CEO CC Wei disclosed previously the foundry expects to start taping out 5nm chip designs later in the first half of 2019 and move the node to volume production in the first half of 2020.
Meanwhile, TSMC continues to expand its 7nm chip client portfolio. Wei noted that the foundry's 7nm chip client portfolio is "growing stronger" as more chip designs for applications such as HPC and automotive demand the process.
TSMC started volume producing 7nm chips in April 2018, with AMD, Apple, HiSilicon and Xilinx reportedly being among its major 7nm chip customers. The foundry will soon roll out its EUV-based 7nm process, which will boost its total 7nm chip sales to account for 25% of total wafer sales this year compared with 9% in 2018.
Climate change is inevitable. We can see it every day all over the world. I write more detailed about this topic in my prime essay writing. It was difficult to describe but I did it.
Climate change has been going on for 4 BILLION YEARS, modern humans have only existed for about 100k years. The industrial revolution is about 100 years old.
Open a book, or wikipedia, and never post here again. Your ignorance makes me sick.
SAN JOSE, Calif. — The semiconductor roadmap could extend a decade to a 1-nm node or it could falter before the 3-nm node for lack of new resist chemistries. Those were some of the hopes and fears that engineers expressed at an evening panel session at an annual lithography conference here.
The session was intended as a lighthearted send-up of the long-predicted death of Moore’s Law. It also showed the disturbing uncertainties that are natural outgrowths of the many challenges perpetually appearing on the path to next-generation chips.
Today, Samsung has started production of 7-nm devices using extreme ultraviolet lithography. TSMC expects to ramp a 7+-nm node using EUV by June. ASML aims to serve both with a 2019 upgrade of its EUV system, the 3400C, promising throughput of 170 wafers/hour and 90+% availability.
One of the next big challenges is brewing more sensitive resist materials for the 3-nm node. Today’s chemically amplified resists (CARs) “are OK for the current and maybe next generation, but we’d like new platforms,” said Tony Yen, a vice president at ASML.
Yen pointed to the long history of CARs dating back to the 1980s and 248-nm lithography. “It’s about time we put more emphasis in new platforms like molecular resists,” Yen said.
With a total market for the crucial chemicals valued at less than a billion dollars a year, “the model needs to change,” he added. “Development could be done in a pre-competitive place and then licensed to commercial resist vendors.”
Ryan Callahan from resist maker FujiFilm disagreed. “There is great competition to secure the business because those who are first will succeed and others will be gone … [but with the] market getting smaller as some [ such as GlobalFoundries] abandon EUV, resist suppliers won’t do consortia for developing together,” he said.
ASML plans to release this year an upgrade of its current EUV system. Click to enlarge. (Source: ASML) In an effort to jumpstart work on resists for next-generation EUV systems, imec and laser specialist KMLabs announced that they will form a so-called AttoLab. It will try to characterize how resists absorb and ionize photons in time frames measured in pico- and attoseconds.
“We will learn how to see the fine detail of radiation chemistry, working with suppliers to find new materials to take us to the next level … We will also look at quantum phenomena … it is pure science, but new technologies may come from this work,” said John Petersen, a principal scientist at imec who co-authored papers describing the new lab.
The resists are one way to reduce random errors known as stochastics, an old problem but one raising its head aggressively as engineers push toward the 5-nm node. Yen was bullish that ASML will deal with the defects that threaten yields.
“Stochastics are more severe now than they were with 193-nm lithography, but they can be countered by higher [light] doses,” Yen said. “Our roadmap goes to 500-W systems, so we are going up in power, and High NA systems will deliver a better image quality, so we are well-prepared to combat stochastics.”
Phillipe Leray, a metrology specialist at imec, was less optimistic. “We have to tackle the defect challenge in the near future,” he said. “Time is running out, and I don’t see any solution around the corner.”
Credit: IBMIBM has announced at this year's American Physical Society meeting that its System Q One quantum computer has reached its "highest quantum volume to date"—a measure that the computer has doubled in performance in each of the past two years, the company reports.
Quantum computers are, as their name implies, computers based on quantum bits. Many physicists and computer scientists believe they will soon outperform traditional computers. Unfortunately, reaching that goal has proven to be a difficult challenge. Several big-name companies have built quantum computers, but none are ready to compete with traditional hardware just yet. These companies have, over time, come to use the number of qubits that a given quantum computer uses as a means of measuring its performance—but most in the field agree that such a number is not really a good way to compare two very different quantum computers.
IBM is one of the big-name companies working to create a truly useful quantum computer, and as part of that effort, has built models that they sell or lease to other companies looking to jump on the quantum bandwagon as soon as they become viable. As part of its announcement, IBM focused specifically on the term "quantum volume"—a metric that has not previously been used in the quantum computing field. IBM claims that it is a better measure of true performance, and is therefore using the metric to show that the company's System Q One quantum computer advancement has been following Moore's Law.
Credit: IBMAs part of its announcement, IBM published an overview of the results of testing several models of its System Q One machine on its corporate blog. One such metric, notably, was "quantum volume," a metric created by a team at IBM, which is described as accounting for "gate and measurement errors as well as device cross talk and connectivity, and circuit software compiler efficiency." The team that created the metric wrote a paper describing the metric and how it is calculated and uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server last November. In that paper, they noted that the new metric "quantifies the largest random circuit of equal width and depth that the computer successfully implements," and pointed out that it is also strongly tied to error rates.
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"Everything is private information, stored on your computer or a computer you designate," says George Church, genetics professor at Harvard Medical School, about the approach of Nebula Genomics.
The greatest hardware hacks of all time were simply the result of finding software keys in memory. The AACS encryption debacle — the 09 F9 key that allowed us to decrypt HD DVDs — was the result of encryption keys just sitting in main memory, where it could be read by any other program. DeCSS, the hack that gave us all access to DVDs was again the result of encryption keys sitting out in the open.
The goals of the Keystone project are to build a chain of trust, starting from a silicon Root of Trust stored in tamper-proof hardware. this leads to a Zeroth-stage bootloader and a tamper-proof platform key store. Defining a hardware Root of Trust (RoT) is exceptionally difficult; you can always decapsulate silicon, you can always perform some sort of analysis on a chip to extract keys, and if your supply chain isn’t managed well, you have no idea if the chip you’re basing your RoT on is actually the chip in your computer. However, by using RISC-V and its Open Source HDL, this RoT can at least be studied, unlike the black box solutions from Intel, AMD, and ARM vendors.
Right now, the Keystone Enclave is testable on various platforms, including QEMU, FireSim, and on real hardware with the SiFive Unleashed. There’s still much work to do, from formal verification to building out the software stack, libraries, and adding hardware extensions.
