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Earlier this month, Hollywood mourned the passing of Michael Madsen, a gifted actor best known for his critically acclaimed roles in Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and Donnie Brasco, among others. Few obituaries have mentioned one of his lesser-known roles: a black ops mercenary hired to help hunt down an escaped human/alien hybrid in 1995's Species. The sci-fi thriller turns 30 this year, and while it garnered decidedly mixed reviews upon release, the film holds up quite well as a not-quite-campy B monster movie that makes for a great guilty pleasure.

(Many spoilers below.)

Screenwriter Dennis Feldman (The Golden Child) was partially inspired by an Arthur C. Clarke article discussing how the odds were slim that an extraterrestrial craft would ever visit Earth, given the great distances that would need to be traversed (assuming that traveling faster than the speed of light would be highly unlikely). Feldman was intrigued by the prospect of making extraterrestrial contact via information— specifically, alien instructions on how to build an instrument that could talk to terrestrial humans.

That instrument wouldn't be mechanical but organic, enabling an extraterrestrial visitor to adapt to Earth via combined DNA. Furthermore, rather than viewing projects like SETI or the Voyager missions—both of which sent transmissions containing information about Earth—as positive, Feldman considered them potentially dangerous, essentially inviting predators to target Earth's inhabitants. His alien would be a kind of bioweapon. The result was Species, which began as a spec script that eventually attracted the interest of MGM and director Roger Donaldson (The Bounty, No Way Out).

The premise is that the US government receives a response to the transmissions set into space: One message gives instructions on a new fuel source; the other contains explicit instructions on how to create an alien DNA sample and splice it with that of a human. Dr. Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley) is the scientist in charge of conducting the latter experiment, and the result is Sil (played as a young girl by Michelle Williams), a female alien/human hybrid they believed would have "docile and controllable" traits.

In just three months, Sil develops into a 12-year-old girl. But she starts exhibiting odd behavior as she sleeps, indicative of violent tendencies. Fitch decides to terminate the experiment, which means killing Sil by filling her containment cell with cyanide gas. A betrayed Sil breaks out of her cell and escapes. Fitch (who is the worst) puts together a crack team to track her down and eliminate her: mercenary Preston Lennox (Madsen); a molecular biologist named Dr. Laura Baker (a pre-CSI Marg Helgenberger); anthropologist Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), and an "empath" named Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker).

An experiment run amok

Sil won't be easy to find. Not only does she evade detection and hop on a train to Los Angeles, but she also transforms into a cocoon stage en route, emerging as a fully grown female (Natasha Henstridge) upon arrival. She's smart and resourceful, too—and very deadly when she feels her survival is threatened, which is often. The team must locate Sil before she manages to mate and produce equally rapid-developing offspring. At least they can follow all the bodies: a tramp on the train, a train conductor, a young woman in a nightclub, a rejected suitor, etc. Of course, she finally manages to mate—with an unsuspecting Arden, no less—and gives birth in the labyrinthine LA sewers, before she and her hybrid son meet their grisly demises.

One can only admire H.R. Giger's striking alien design; he wanted to create a monster who was "an aesthetic warrior, also sensual and deadly," and he very much delivered on that vision. He had also wanted several stages of development for Sil, but in the end, the filmmakers kept things simple, limiting themselves to the cocoon stage that shepherded young Sil through puberty and Sil's final alien maternal form with translucent skin—described as being "like a glass body but with carbon inside."

That said, Giger didn't much care for the final film. He thought it was much too similar to the Alien franchise, which boasts his most famous creature design, the xenomorph. For instance, there is the same punching tongue (Giger had wanted to incorporate barbed hooks for Sil), and Sil giving birth seems eerily akin to Alien's famous "chestburster" scene. Giger did manage to convince the director to have the team ultimately take out Sil with a fatal shot to the head rather than with flame-throwers, which he felt was too derivative of Alien 3 and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Giger had a point: Species is not particularly ground-breaking or original in terms of plot or the nature of the alien posing a threat to humankind. The dialogue is uninspired (occasionally downright trite) and the characters aren't well-developed, most notably Kingsley's weak-willed amoral scientist and Whitaker's reluctant empath—both exceptionally gifted actors who are largely wasted here. Poor Whitaker is reduced to looking broody and stating the obvious about whatever Sil might be "feeling." There are gestures toward themes that are never fully explored, and the outcome is predictable, right down to the final twist.

The mating game

But there's also plenty to like about Species. Madsen and Helgenberger give strong performances and have excellent on-screen chemistry; their sweetly awkward sex scene is the antithesis of Sil's far more brutal approach—in fact, Sil learns more about the subtleties of seduction by eavesdropping on the pair. And the film is well-paced, with all the right beats and memorable moments for a successful sci-fi thriller.

Former model Henstridge acquits herself just fine in her debut role. Much was made in the press of Henstridge's nude scenes, but while her beauty is used to great effect, it's the character of Sil and her journey that compels our attention the most, along with our shifting emotions toward her. Young Sil is sympathetic, the result of an unethical science experiment. She didn't ask to be born and has little control over what is happening to her. But she does want to live (hence her escape) and is genuinely scared when she begins to transform into her cocoon on the train.

Our sympathy is tested when adult Sil brutally kills a kindly train conductor, and then a romantic rival in a nightclub, both in a very gruesome manner. We might be able to rationalize the killing of the first rejected suitor, since he refuses to accept she's changed her mind about mating with him and gets rough. But nice guy John (Whip Hubley)? The woman she takes as hostage to fake her own death? Both offer to help Sil and die for their trouble.

Granted, Sil's distrust of humans is learned. She is being hunted by a team of professionals who intend to kill her, after all. When the woman hostage swears she won't harm Sil if she lets her go, Sil responds, "Yes you would. You just don't know it yet." We gradually realize that Sil is not that little girl any longer—if she ever was—but a ruthless creature driven entirely by instinct, even if she doesn't fully understand why she's been sent to Earth in the first place. As Laura notes, adult Sil views humans as disposable "intergalactic weeds." By the time we get to the showdown in the sewer, Sil isn't even in human form anymore, so the audience has no qualms about her eventual violent demise.

Species performed well enough at the box office to spawn multiple sequels—each one worse than the last— an adapted novel, and a Dark Horse Comics series. None of them captured the unique combination of elements that lifted the original above its various shortcomings. It will never match Alien, but Species is nonetheless an entertaining ride.

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Nvidia is recommending a mitigation for customers of one of its GPU product lines that will degrade performance by up to 10 percent in a bid to protect users from exploits that could let hackers sabotage work projects and possibly cause other compromises.

The move comes in response to an attack a team of academic researchers demonstrated against Nvidia’s RTX A6000, a widely used GPU for high-performance computing that’s available from many cloud services. A vulnerability the researchers discovered opens the GPU to Rowhammer, a class of attack that exploits physical weakness in DRAM chip modules that store data.

Rowhammer allows hackers to change or corrupt data stored in memory by rapidly and repeatedly accessing—or hammering—a physical row of memory cells. By repeatedly hammering carefully chosen rows, the attack induces bit flips in nearby rows, meaning a digital zero is converted to a one or vice versa. Until now, Rowhammer attacks have been demonstrated only against memory chips for CPUs, used for general computing tasks.

Like catastrophic brain damage

That changed last week as researchers unveiled GPUhammer, the first known successful Rowhammer attack on a discrete GPU. Traditionally, GPUs were used for rendering graphics and cracking passwords. In recent years, GPUs have become the workhorses for tasks such as high-performance computing, machine learning, neural networking, and other AI uses. No company has benefited more from the AI and HPC boom than Nvidia, which last week became the first company to reach a $4 trillion valuation. While the researchers demonstrated their attack against only the A6000, it likely works against other GPUs from Nvidia, the researchers said.

The researchers’ proof-of-concept exploit was able to tamper with deep neural network models used in machine learning for things like autonomous driving, healthcare applications, and medical imaging for analyzing MRI scans. GPUHammer flips a single bit in the exponent of a model weight—for example in y, where a floating point is represented as x times 2^y. The single bit flip can increase the exponent value by 16. The result is an altering of the model weight by a whopping 2¹⁶, degrading model accuracy from 80 percent to 0.1 percent, said Gururaj Saileshwar, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and co-author of an academic paper demonstrating the attack.

“This is like inducing catastrophic brain damage in the model: with just one bit flip, accuracy can crash from 80% to 0.1%, rendering it useless,” Saileshwar wrote in an email. “With such accuracy degradation, a self-driving car may misclassify stop signs (reading a stop sign as a speed limit 50 mph sign), or stop recognizing pedestrians. A healthcare model might misdiagnose patients. A security classifier may fail to detect malware.”

In response, Nvidia is recommending users implement a defense that could degrade overall performance by as much as 10 percent. Among machine learning inference workloads the researchers studied, the slowdown affects the “3D U-Net ML Model” the most. This model is used for an array of HPC tasks, such as medical imaging.

The performance hit is caused by the resulting reduction in bandwidth between the GPU and the memory module, which the researchers estimated as 12 percent. There’s also a 6.25 percent loss in memory capacity across the board, regardless of the workload. Performance degradation will be the highest for applications that access large amounts of memory.

A figure in the researchers’ academic paper provides the overhead breakdowns for the workloads tested.

Rowhammer attacks present a threat to memory inside the typical laptop or desktop computer in a home or office, but most Rowhammer research in recent years has focused on the threat inside cloud environments. That's because these environments often allot the same physical CPU or GPU to multiple users. A malicious attacker can run Rowhammer code on a cloud instance that has the potential to tamper with the data a CPU or GPU is processing on behalf of a different cloud customer. Saileshwar said that Amazon Web Services and smaller providers such as Runpod and Lambda Cloud all provide A6000s instances. (He added that AWS enables a defense that prevents GPUhammer from working.)

Not your parents’ Rowhammer

Rowhammer attacks are difficult to perform for various reasons. For one thing, GPUs access data from GDDR (graphics double data rate) physically located on the GPU board, rather than the DDR (double data rate) modules that are separate from the CPUs accessing them. The proprietary physical mapping of the thousands of banks inside a typical GDDR board is entirely different from their DDR counterparts. That means that hammering patterns required for a successful attack are completely different. Further complicating attacks, the physical addresses for GPUs aren’t exposed, even to a privileged user, making reverse engineering harder.

GDDR modules also have up to four times higher memory latency and faster refresh rates. One of the physical characteristics Rowhammer exploits is that the increased frequency of accesses to a DRAM row disturbs the charge in neighboring rows, introducing bit flips in neighboring rows. Bit flips are much harder to induce with higher latencies. GDDR modules also contain proprietary mitigations that can further stymie Rowhammer attacks.

In response to GPUhammer, Nvidia published a security notice last week reminding customers of a protection formally known as system-level error-correcting code. ECC works by using what are known as memory words to store redundant control bits next to the data bits inside the memory chips. CPUs and GPUs use these words to quickly detect and correct flipped bits.

GPUs based on Nvidia’s Hopper and Blackwell architectures already have ECC turned on. On other architectures, ECC is not enabled by default. The means for enabling the defense vary by the architecture. Checking the settings in Nvidia GPUs designated for data centers can be done out-of-band using a system’s BMC (baseboard management controller) and software such as Redfish to check for the “ECCModeEnabled” status. ECC status can also be checked using an in-band method that uses the system CPU to probe the GPU.

The protection does come with its limitations, as Saileshwar explained in an email:

On NVIDIA GPUs like the A6000, ECC typically uses SECDED (Single Error Correction, Double Error Detection) codes. This means Single-bit errors are automatically corrected in hardware and Double-bit errors are detected and flagged, but not corrected. So far, all the Rowhammer bit flips we detected are single-bit errors, so ECC serves as a sufficient mitigation. But if Rowhammer induces 3 or more bit flips in a ECC code word, ECC may not be able to detect it or may even cause a miscorrection and a silent data corruption. So, using ECC as a mitigation is like a double-edged sword.

Saileshwar said that other Nvidia chips may also be vulnerable to the same attack. He singled out GDDR6-based GPUs in Nvidia’s Ampere generation, which are used for machine learning and gaming. Newer GPUs, such as the H100 (with HBM3) or RTX 5090 (with GDDR7), feature on-die ECC, meaning the error detection is built directly into the memory chips.

“This may offer better protection against bit flips,” Saileshwar said. “However, these protections haven’t been thoroughly tested against targeted Rowhammer attacks, so while they may be more resilient, vulnerability cannot yet be ruled out.”

In the decade since the discovery of Rowhammer, GPUhammer is the first variant to flip bits inside discrete GPUs and the first to attack GDDR6 GPU memory modules. All attacks prior to GPUhammer targeted CPU memory chips such as DDR3/4 or LPDDR3/4.

That includes this 2018 Rowhammer variant. While it used a GPU as the hammer, the memory being targeted remained LPDDR3/4 memory chips. GDDR forms of memory have a different form factor. It follows different standards and is soldered onto the GPU board, in contrast to LPDDR, which is in a chip located on hardware apart from the CPUs.

Besides Saileshwar, the researchers behind GPUhammer include Chris S. Lin and Joyce Qu from the University of Toronto. They will be presenting their research next month at the 2025 Usenix Security Conference.

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Physicists with the LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration have detected the gravitational wave signal (dubbed GW231123) of the most massive merger between two black holes yet observed, resulting in a new black hole that is 225 times more massive than our Sun. The results were presented at the Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves in Glasgow, Scotland.

The LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration searches the universe for gravitational waves produced by the mergers of black holes and neutron stars. LIGO detects gravitational waves via laser interferometry, using high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington, and in Livingston, Louisiana. A third detector in Italy, Advanced Virgo, came online in 2016. In Japan, KAGRA is the first gravitational-wave detector in Asia and the first to be built underground. Construction began on LIGO-India in 2021, and physicists expect it will turn on sometime after 2025.

To date, the collaboration has detected dozens of merger events since its first Nobel Prize-winning discovery. Early detected mergers involved either two black holes or two neutron stars.  In 2021, LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA confirmed the detection of two separate "mixed" mergers between black holes and neutron stars.

LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA started its fourth observing run in 2023, and by the following year had announced the detection of a signal indicating a merger between two compact objects, one of which was most likely a neutron star. The other had an intermediate mass—heavier than a neutron star and lighter than a black hole. It was the first gravitational-wave detection of a mass-gap object paired with a neutron star and hinted that the mass gap might be less empty than astronomers previously thought.

Until now, the most massive back hole merger was GW190521, detected in 2020. It produced a new black hole with an intermediate mass—about 140 times as heavy as our Sun. Also found in the fourth run, GW231123 dwarfs the prior merger. According to the collaboration, the two black holes that merged were about 100 and 140 solar masses, respectively. It took some time to announce the discovery because the objects were spinning rapidly, near the limits imposed by the general theory of relativity, making the signal much more difficult to interpret.

The discovery is also noteworthy because it conflicts with current theories about stellar evolution. The progenitor black holes are too big to have formed from a supernova. Like its predecessor, GW190521, GW231123 may be an example of a so-called "hierarchical merger," meaning the two progenitor black holes were themselves each the result of a previous merger before they found each other and merged.

“The discovery of such a massive and highly spinning system presents a challenge not only to our data analysis techniques but will have a major effect on the theoretical studies of black hole formation channels and waveform modeling for many years to come," said Ed Porter of CNRS in Paris.

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On Monday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican appointees allowed the Republican Trump administration to gut the Education Department, a lawless ruling that laid bare the empty politics of the Roberts court.

The was no reasoning provided by the majority, and yet, with their action, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent for the Democratic appointees, the majority “hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out.”

When it’s a Republican president, at least.

On May 22, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun, a Biden appointee, ruled that the Trump administration’s effort to “shut down” the Education Department was likely unconstitutional and illegal. The facts, as summed up by Joun in his 88-page opinion, are pretty simple:

As Joun explained of the mass reduction-in-force (RIF) efforts:

Specifically, in addition to violating the Administrative Procedure Act, Joun addressed how the actions are likely unconstitutional:

The Executive Order’s direction to “facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and location communities” goes directly against Congress’s intent in creating the Department to “supplement and complement the efforts of States, the local school systems and other instrumentalities of the States, the private sector, public and private educational institutions, public and private nonprofit educational research institutions, community-based organizations, parents, and students to improve the quality of education.” … While it may be true that the President has the power to remove executive officers, … Defendants cite to no case that this power includes the power to dismantle Congressionally created departments and programs through mass terminations.

As such, he concluded, “These actions violate the separation of powers by violating the executive’s duties to take care to faithfully execute laws enacted by Congress, as well as its duties to expend funds that Congress has authorized it to appropriate.“ Accordingly, Joun issued the preliminary injunction.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit denied the Trump administration’s request for a stay pending appeal, itself providing a 26-page, detailed explanation for its order. Chief Judge David Barron, an Obama appointee, concluded the ruling for the unanimous three-judge panel as such:

On Monday, the Supreme Court implicitly rejected both of those courts’ decisions, issuing a stay that will allow Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon to destroy the federal agency.

This provided an answer to the question left with last week’s order allowing mass-RIF planning to continue across the government. Because last week’s order was — arguably — about executive power to set priorities, and not a ruling on whether specific implementation would be allowed, it remained possible that specific RIF implementation efforts might be blocked.

Not so, the Republican appointees on the court said Monday, blocking the two lower court rulings in this case as to an agency-specific RIF in a case “replete” with evidence of the Trump administration’s lawless intent “to effectively dismantle” the Education Department without congressional authorization.

Monday’s ruling would be offensive to the rule of law in any scenario, but for Chief Justice John Roberts, in particular, to do so in a case involving the Education Department, in particular, it is little more than the Chief Justice of the United States laughing in the face of Americans and the rule of law.

It was Roberts, two short years ago, who held that then-president Joe Biden’s administration overstepped when his education secretary interpreted the “waive or modify“ language in the HEROES Act to include forgiving student loans.

That, Roberts wrote for the court’s 6-3 majority, was not allowed. Here was Roberts on June 30, 2023:

Two years and two weeks after that ruling over the word “waive,” the Roberts court gave the Trump administration the go-ahead — on the shadow docket and with no reasoning — to “effectively dismantle” the Education Department, all of the laws to the contrary be damned.

As Sotomayor put it in dissent: “When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it.“

For today’s Supreme Court, that is a condemnation — not a statement of principle.

A court that does not follow such a simple truism is a court that is acknowledging its lawlessness.

A contrast in essays

Two essays published on Sunday highlighted to me the vast difference in how people left of center are experiencing this moment.

In The New York Times, David Litt, a former Obama speechwriter, wrote about surfing with his Joe Rogan-listening, vaccine-opponent brother-in-law.

Litt wrote about “a sorting into belief camps“ — highlighting, in 2025, his brother-in-law’s refusal to get the Covid-19 vaccine in 2021 — in discussing intentional cutting of family ties.

“No one is required to spend time with people they don’t care for,” Litt continued. “But those of us who feel an obligation to shun strategically need to ask: What has all this banishing accomplished? It’s not just ineffective. It’s counterproductive.”

After discussing how he and his brother-in-line reached a closer connection while surfing, he gave this bottom-line argument:

Our differences are meaningful, but allowing them to mean everything is part of how we ended up here. When we cut off contacts, or let algorithms sort us into warring factions, we forget that not so long ago, we used to have things to talk about that didn’t involve politics. Shunning plays into the hands of demagogues, making it easier for them to divide us and even, in some cases, to incite violence.

Then there was Hanif Abdurraqib, who wrote in The New Yorker about the night Zohran Mamdani and Mahmoud Khalil joined Ramy Youssef on stage at New York City’s Beacon Theatre.

The subhed made clear where this essay would be taking us: “What it feels like to laugh when the world expects you to disappear.”

The reality that Litt’s essay ignored was front and center — in fact, was a point — of what Abdurraqib would be telling us

Abdurraqib wrote about the people who are being shunned — and worse — by the government. This is not a question about who is invited to a holiday gathering; it is a question of whether the gathering is even possible.

Abdurraqib’s prose is art, but the story he tells is of a simple moment — a moment that powerful people wanted never to happen — at “a sold-out [comedy] show at the Beacon Theatre, in New York.”

As Ramy Youssef took the stage on June 28, Abdurraqib wrote: “Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia graduate and pro-Palestinian activist just released from ICE detention, was in the front row. To his right sat his wife, Noor Abdalla. To his left, Zohran Mamdani,” who days earlier became the Democratic Party’s nominee to be the next mayor of New York City.

Abdurraqib continued:

It was a delight to catch a glimpse of Khalil in the throes of laughter. He laughed as though each laugh were a physical vessel urgently exiting his body, or a secret he’d held for so long that it had forced its way out. Khalil’s body jerked forward when he laughed—his laughter was more of a kinetic event than a sonic one. He rocked, he shook slightly, and he smiled wide. One seat over, Mamdani laughed, too, with a bit more volume; his laughter seemed to arrive less like a long-held secret than like an idea that he couldn’t wait to share. Most of the audience didn’t know that the two men were in the room, and because of this most of the audience missed out on the small miracle of watching them share their joy at the scene before them.

Khalil and Mamdani, Abdurraqib wrote, hadn’t met before that night. As they settled into discussion, death threats — a familiar topic to all three of them — came up.

“After this, there was a brief silence among the three of us, a beat of shared recognition of the difficulties of staying alive,“ Abdurraqib wrote, continuing:

In the lull, I found myself considering distance again—the distance that exists between two Muslim men who are navigating two distinct victories that thrust upon them similar concerns. I thought about the distance between the people who want you dead and the people who want you gone, vanished through deportation or a more mundane form of silencing. There might not be as much distance between those two groups as we’d like there to be, especially if their members are loud, have power, and are unafraid to publicly fantasize about material violence.

The “sorting into belief camps” of which Litt wrote plays out far differently when actual detention camps are the place into which the government wishes to — and does — sort you.

For more than 100 days, Khalil had no choice as to his whereabouts, let alone as to whether he should go surfing with Stephen Miller. (Litt actually wrote about this, concluding that he would “decline” to go surfing with Miller.)

Some people are not choosing who to “banish” from family events. The Trump administration wants to banish them from America.

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