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In November 1988, a graduate student at Cornell University named Robert Morris, Jr. inadvertently sparked a national crisis by unleashing a self-replicating computer worm on a VAX 11/750 computer in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab. Morris had no malicious intent; it was merely a scientific experiment to see how many computers he could infect. But he made a grievous error, setting his reinfection rate much too high. The worm spread so rapidly that it brought down the entire computer network at Cornell University, crippled those at several other universities, and even infiltrated the computers at Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories.

Making matters worse, his father was a computer scientist and cryptographer who was the chief scientist at the National Security Agency's National Computer Security Center . Even though it was unintentional and witnesses testified that Morris didn't have "a fraudulent or dishonest bone in his body," he was convicted of felonious computer fraud. The judge was merciful during sentencing. Rather than 15–20 years in prison, Morris got three years of probation with community service and had to pay a $10,000 fine. He went on to found Y Combinator with his longtime friend Paul Graham , among other accomplishments.

The " Morris Worm " is just one of five hacking cases that Scott Shapiro highlights in his new book, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks . Shapiro is a legal philosopher at Yale University, but as a child, his mathematician father—who worked at Bell Labs—sparked an interest in computing by bringing home various components, like microchips, resistors, diodes, LEDs, and breadboards. Their father/son outings included annual attendance at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers convention in New York City. Then, a classmate in Shapiro's high school biology class introduced him to programming on the school's TRS-80, and Shapiro was hooked. He moved on to working on an Apple II and majored in computer science in college but lost interest afterward and went to law school instead.

Enlarge / The much-larger-than-2D form of molybdenum disulfide. (credit: RHJ / Getty Images )

Atomically thin materials like graphene are single molecules in which all the chemical bonds are oriented so that the resulting molecule forms a sheet. These often have distinctive electronic properties that can potentially enable the production of electronics with incredibly small features only a couple of atoms thick. And there have been a number of examples of functional hardware being built from these two-dimensional materials.

But almost all the examples so far have used bespoke construction, sometimes involving researchers manipulating individual flakes of material by hand. So we're not at the point where we can mass-manufacture complicated electronics out of these materials. But a paper released today describes a method of doing wafer-scale production of transistors based on two-dimensional materials. And the resulting transistors perform more consistently than those made with more traditional manufacturing approaches.

Better manufacturing

Most of the efforts made toward easing the production of electronics based on atomically thin materials have involved integrating these materials into traditional semiconductor manufacturing techniques. That makes sense because these techniques allow us to perform incredibly fine-scale manipulations of materials at high volumes. Typically, this has meant that much of the metal wiring needed for the electronics is put in place by traditional manufacturing. The 2D material is then layered on top of the metal, and additional processing is done to form functional transistors.

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Standing desks—and even biking desks —are a response to a growing body of studies showing that a sedentary lifestyle creates many health risks. Regular physical activity appears to confer a degree of protection from various problems, both physical and mental, and many results indicate that this doesn't have to be Olympic-level training. Simply walking around the apartment a few times a day appears to help.

Now, a team of researchers has looked at the opposite question: Are all forms of inactivity equal? The answer is probably not. While the details depend on the health issues involved, there's likely to be some good news for people reading this, in that computer use appears to be somewhat protective against dementia.

Get off your chair

The physical risks associated with inactivity are generally associated with lower cardiovascular health, either directly or via obesity. Even a small amount of physical activity appears capable of limiting these impacts, although increased exercise generally seems to be even better (details vary depending on the study and the exact risk being examined).