Assorted links for Tuesday, June 25:
- Radioactive drugs strike cancer with precision
Pluvicto and Lutathera are both built around small protein sequences, known as peptides. These peptides specifically bind to target receptors on cancer cells—PSMA in the case of prostate cancer and somatostatin receptors in the case of Lutathera—and deliver radiation through the decay of unstable lutetium.
Administered via infusion into the bloodstream, these drugs circulate throughout the body until they firmly attach to the surfaces of tumor cells they encounter. Anchored at these target sites, the lutetium isotope then releases two types of radiation that aid in cancer treatment. The primary emission consists of beta particles, high-energy electrons capable of penetrating tumors and surrounding cells, tearing into DNA and causing damage that ultimately triggers cell death.
- Amazon Exploring MM-Local Memory Allocations To Help With Current/Future Speculation Attacks
Back in 2019 after various speculation-based CPU vulnerabilities began coming to light, Amazon engineers proposed process-local memory allocations for hiding KVM secrets. They were striving for an alternative mitigation for vulnerabilities like L1TF by essentially providing some memory regions for kernel allocations out of view/access from other kernel code. Amazon engineers this week laid out a new proposal after five years of ongoing Linux kernel improvements for MM-local memory allocations for dealing with current and future speculation-based cross-process attacks.
- TypeSpec: An API design language that either competes with, or augments, OpenAPI.
- Optimize Kubernetes Pods’ Startup Time Using VolumeSnapshots: If your K8S application uses enormous, static data sources, using VolumeSnapshots may speed up its launch time significantly.
- Building a GitOps CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub Actions (SOC 2)