Day: January 9, 2018

Henrietta Lacks And Immortal Cell Lines

January 9, 2018 by 80 Comments

In early 1951, a woman named Henrietta Lacks visited the “colored ward” at Johns Hopkins hospital for a painful lump she found on her cervix. She was seen by Dr. Howard W. Jones, who indeed found a tumor growing on the surface of her cervix. He took a tissue sample, which confirmed Henrietta’s worst fears: She had cancer.

The treatment at the time was to irradiate the tumor with radium tubes placed in and around the cervix. The hope was that this would kill the cancerous cells while preserving the healthy tissue. Unbeknownst to Henrietta, a biopsy was taken during her radium procedure. Slivers of her tumor and of healthy cervix cells were cut away. The cancer cells were used as part of a research project. Then something amazing happened: the cancerous cells grew and continued to grow outside of her body.

As Henrietta herself lay dying, the HeLa immortal cell line was born. This cell line has been used in nearly every aspect of medical research since the polio vaccine. Millions owe their lives to it. Yet, Henrietta and her family never gave consent for any of this. Her family was not informed or compensated. In fact, until recently, they didn’t fully grasp exactly how Henrietta’s cells were being used.

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Raspberry Pi Ain’t Afraid Of No Spectre And Will Not Meltdown

January 9, 2018 by 43 Comments

While there’s broad agreement that Meltdown and Spectre attacks are really bad news at a fundamental level, there is disagreement on its immediate practical impact in the real world. Despite reassurance that no attacks have been detected in the wild and there’s time to roll out the full spectrum of mitigation, some want to find protection right now. If you’re interested in an usable and easy to set up modern desktop that’s free of Meltdown or Spectre threats, a Raspberry Pi can provide the immunity you seek.

[Eben Upton] explained the side channel attacks using fragments of Python for illustration, which was an enlightening read independent of the Raspberry Pi pitch. While these ARM cores perform speculative instruction fetches, they don’t speculatively execute them or modify the cache. Under the current circumstances, that makes all the difference in the world.

A clever security researcher may yet find a way to exploit speculative fetches in the future, and claiming that Raspberry Pi has superior security would be a stretch. The platform has its own set of security problems, but today Meltdown/Spectre is not among them. And that just might be enough to sway some decisions.

If you need to stay in the x86 world, look over what it’d take to to rewind back to an Intel 486.

Thanks to [D00med] for sharing the link in a comment to our overview article.

Improved Perfboard For Surface Mount Parts

January 9, 2018 by 26 Comments

Look through the last two decades of electronics project built on perfboard, and you’ll notice a trend. Perfboard is designed for through-hole parts, but ever more frequently, the parts we need are only available as surface mount devices. What does this mean for the future of all those protoboard, veroboard, and tagboard designs? It’s not good, but fortunately, there may be an answer. It’s perfboard designed for mounting SOICs, SOTs, and other surface mount devices.

Perfboard is an extremely simple concept. Most through-hole electronic components are built around 0.1″ or 2.54 mm spacing between pins. Yes, there are exceptions, but you can always bend the middle pin of a transistor and put it in a hole. SMT devices are different. You can’t really bend the pins, and the pin pitch is too small for the 0.1″ holes in traditional perfboard.

[electronic_eel] is changing that game up with his own design for perfboard. This perfboard has the traditional 0.1″ holes, but there are SMD pads sprinkled about between these holes. The result is being able to solder SOIC, SOT23-6, SOT23 and SOT363 devices directly to a board alongside 0603 and 0805 devices. Connect everything with a few beads of solder and you have a functional circuit made out of surface mount devices on something that’s still compatible with the old protoboard designs.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a new type of protoboard make it into production. A few years ago, Perf+, a bizarre ‘bus-based’ protoboard solution came onto the scene, although that wasn’t really designed for SMD parts. While [electronic_eel] doesn’t have any plans to sell his protoboard, the files are available, and you can easily design your own small piece of perfboard.