An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Pop-up notifications are often annoying. For Meta, one in Apple's iOS operating system, which powers iPhones, is a particular headache. On February 2nd Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, told investors that privacy-focused changes to iOS, including the "ask app not to track" notification, would cost the company around $10 billion in 2022. That revelation, along with growing competition and sluggish growth in user numbers, helped to prompt a 23% plunge in Meta's share price and showed Apple's might. But what did Apple actually do, and why was it so costly?

The promise of digital advertising has always been its ability to precisely target people. Before the digital age, companies placed ads in places where they expected potential customers would see them, such as a newspaper, and hoped for the best. Online, companies could instead target ads based on people's browsing history and interests. This fueled the profits of companies like Meta, which held vast amounts of data on their users. For years, Apple helped by offering an "identifier for advertisers" (IDFA), giving advertisers a way to track people's behavior on its devices. Users have long been able to disable IDFA in their phones' settings. But last year, citing privacy concerns, Apple turned off IDFA by default and forced apps to ask people if they want to be tracked. It seems most do not: a study in December by AppsFlyer, an ad-tech company, suggested that 54% of Apple users who saw the prompt opted out.

This change has made digital advertising much trickier. Sheryl Sandberg, Meta's chief operating officer, told investors that the change decreased the accuracy of ad targeting and slowed the collection of data showing whether ads work. Both of these changes make "direct-response ads," which encourage consumers to take an action like clicking or purchasing, less appealing to advertisers. The financial impact on ad-sellers like Meta has been painful. The $10 billion hit estimated by Meta amounts to over 8% of its revenue in 2021. Snap, another social-media company, and Unity, a games engine which operates an ad network, also expect Apple's changes to hurt their businesses. Apple, meanwhile, is doing well: estimates suggest its own ad business has grown significantly since it introduced the app tracking pop-up. (A different pop-up, with a more persuasive sales pitch for opting-in to tracking, appears on Apple's own apps.)

Mark Zuckerberg's virtual reality business is to introduce a mandatory distance between people's digital avatars after warnings that the social media tycoon's plans for a metaverse will lead to a new wave of online harassment. From a report: Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, is making a multibillion-dollar bet on VR as the next source of growth for his empire but his strategy has already been dogged by warnings that virtual worlds are rife with abuse. In December a user testing Horizon Worlds, a VR app owned by Zuckerberg's Meta business, complained of being groped online and called for a protective bubble around their avatar, or digital representation of themselves. "Sexual harassment is no joke on the regular internet but being in VR adds another layer that makes the event more intense," said the user.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Mark Zuckerberg quipped that if he started to cry, it wasn't because of the day's news. His red, teary eyes were the result of a scratched cornea, the Facebook founder said Thursday, attempting to lighten the mood as Meta Platforms' stock price lost more than a quarter of its value. At a company-wide virtual meeting, Zuckerberg explained that the historic stock drop was a result of Meta's weak forecast for revenue in the current quarter, according to a person who attended and was not authorized to speak about it. It is important to focus on growing Facebook's short-video product, he said. Zuckerberg echoed his remarks of a day earlier to investors, telling employees that the social networking giant faced an "unprecedented level of competition," with the rise of TikTok, the rival viral-video platform. Meta's Instagram app has a copycat of TikTok called Reels, which the company is now prioritizing.

Employees were glued to the stock price. Facebook lost a record $251 billion of value in a single day. Some were discussing buying shares during the dip, believing in Zuckerberg's long-term vision for the metaverse, an immersive version of the internet. Others fretted about what a continued decline might mean for their net worth, according to people familiar with the matter. Zuckerberg's own wealth dropped by $31 billion. Meta is already talking about ways to retain staff amid the stock rout. The social media giant is thinking of extending existing three-day holiday weekends, Zuckerberg said, responding to a question on burnout. He also encouraged exhausted employees to use their vacation days. He added that based on his life experience, transitioning to a four-day work week all the time would not be productive.

Big tech companies whose online platforms carry advertisements for scams should be made to reimburse victims, British lawmakers said, as part of wider efforts to combat a growing epidemic of online fraud in Britain. From a report: While banks have signed up for a voluntary code to reimburse fraud victims who do enough to protect themselves, there is not sufficient regulation governing social media and other websites where victims are often first lured in, Mel Stride, chairman of the cross-party Treasury committee, told Reuters. "The government should look at some kind of arrangement that makes the polluter pay," he said. "Online platforms are hosting this stuff, not really putting enough effort into weeding it out, and indeed financially benefiting because they're getting the advertising revenues," Stride said. TechUK, a trade body that represents major tech companies in Britain, including Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft, declined to provide an immediate comment. Stride's comments came as the Treasury committee on Wednesday published the findings of a report on economic crime, which urged the government to seriously consider forcing online platforms to help to refund victims.

A new study out of Germany says having traffic lights use AI technology may keep traffic flowing faster and smoother. Jalopnik reports: One of the partners in the study with an aggressively German name -- the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation -- recently installed high-resolution cameras and radar sensors at a busy intersection with a traffic light in the city of Lemgo, according to New Atlas. The setup recorded the number of vehicles waiting for the light to change, the amount of time each of them had to wait and the average speed a vehicle drove through the intersection. Science wizardry was then used to train a machine-learning based computer algorithm. It experimented with different light-changing patterns. They would continuously adapt to real time traffic conditions and see which ones worked best to keep wait times down.

According to the simulations, the best artificial intelligence patterns could improve traffic flow by 10 to 15 percent. That may not sound like a ton, but add up all the time you spend white-knuckled at a long traffic light, and chop 15 percent off. Not too bad. The algorithm will be used to run the traffic lights at actual intersections in Germany for the next few months, and can only get better. The study is also looking to find ways to reduce waiting times at crosswalks for pedestrians. They're using LiDAR sensors among other things to assess the walking speed of pedestrians to make sure they have enough time to cross before the light turns on them.

A group of lawmakers have re-introduced the EARN IT Act, an incredibly unpopular bill from 2020 that "would pave the way for a massive new surveillance system, run by private companies, that would roll back some of the most important privacy and security features in technology used by people around the globe," writes Joe Mullin via the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's a framework for private actors to scan every message sent online and report violations to law enforcement. And it might not stop there. The EARN IT Act could ensure that anything hosted online -- backups, websites, cloud photos, and more -- is scanned." From the report: The bill empowers every U.S. state or territory to create sweeping new Internet regulations, by stripping away the critical legal protections for websites and apps that currently prevent such a free-for-all -- specifically, Section 230. The states will be allowed to pass whatever type of law they want to hold private companies liable, as long as they somehow relate their new rules to online child abuse. The goal is to get states to pass laws that will punish companies when they deploy end-to-end encryption, or offer other encrypted services. This includes messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage, as well as web hosts like Amazon Web Services. [...]

Separately, the bill creates a 19-person federal commission, dominated by law enforcement agencies, which will lay out voluntary "best practices" for attacking the problem of online child abuse. Regardless of whether state legislatures take their lead from that commission, or from the bill's sponsors themselves, we know where the road will end. Online service providers, even the smallest ones, will be compelled to scan user content, with government-approved software like PhotoDNA. If EARN IT supporters succeed in getting large platforms like Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services to scan, they might not even need to compel smaller websites -- the government will already have access to the user data, through the platform. [...] Senators supporting the EARN IT Act say they need new tools to prosecute cases over child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. But the methods proposed by EARN IT take aim at the security and privacy of everything hosted on the Internet.

The Senators supporting the bill have said that their mass surveillance plans are somehow magically compatible with end-to-end encryption. That's completely false, no matter whether it's called "client side scanning" or another misleading new phrase. The EARN IT Act doesn't target Big Tech. It targets every individual internet user, treating us all as potential criminals who deserve to have every single message, photograph, and document scanned and checked against a government database. Since direct government surveillance would be blatantly unconstitutional and provoke public outrage, EARN IT uses tech companies -- from the largest ones to the very smallest ones -- as its tools. The strategy is to get private companies to do the dirty work of mass surveillance.

Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg rallied his employees to focus on video products, after they watched the stock lose a quarter of its value. Bloomberg reports: At a company-wide virtual meeting Thursday, Zuckerberg explained that the historic stock drop was a result of Meta's weak forecast for revenue in the current quarter, according to a person who attended and was not authorized to speak about it. Zuckerberg echoed his remarks of a day earlier to investors, telling employees that the social networking giant faced an "unprecedented level of competition," with the rise of TikTok, the short-video platform Facebook doesn't own. Zuckerberg appeared red-eyed and wore glasses, the person said. He said he might tear up because he'd scratched his eye -- not because of the topics up for discussion.

Meta is already talking about ways to retain staff amid the stock rout. The social media giant is thinking of offering long weekends, Zuckerberg said, responding to a question on burnout. He also encouraged exhausted employees to use their vacation days. He added that based on his life experience, transitioning to a four-day work week would not be productive. Employee shares vest on Feb. 15, and manager conversations about bonuses and promotions happen in March -- both of which could be factors in workers' potential decisions to leave, according to another person familiar with the company's plans.

According to The Washington Post, the EPA and White House Council on Environmental Quality have objected to the US Postal Service's proposal to mostly buy gas-powered next-gen delivery trucks in a project worth up to $11.3 billion. "The current strategy is a 'lost opportunity' to more drastically reduce the carbon footprint of one of the world's largest government fleets," reports Engadget, citing EPA associate policy administrator Vicki Arroyo. From the report: Only 10 percent of the USPS' new trucks would be electric under the existing proposal, and the overall effort would only improve the fleet's fuel economy by 0.4MPG. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy previously claimed the Postal Service couldn't afford more electric mail vehicles, and has argued his agency needs to focus on basic infrastructure improvements over technology. The USPS is required by law to be self-sufficient, and can't simply request government funds.

There may be an uphill battle to make any changes. DeJoy has staunchly refused to alter the purchasing plan, and the USPS rejected California officials' January 28th request for a public hearing on the plans. The service also largely ignored EPA advice when it created the analysis guiding its plan. The environmental regulator accused the USPS of using "biased" estimates that preferred gas-based trucks. The mail institution reportedly assumed battery and gas prices would remain static even decades later, and that the existing charging infrastructure wouldn't grow. It further overestimated the emissions from plug-in vehicles, according to the EPA.

The Postal Service might be forced to change regardless. The EPA has the option of referring its disagreements to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which can mediate disputes like this. The letters gave the USPS a last chance to voluntarily rethink its proposal before the Council stepped in, sources for The Post claimed. Environmental groups are also likely to sue if the gas-centric plan moves ahead, and the law firm Earthjustice told The Post the USPS might lose when its proposal often lacks supporting evidence. You may well see a transition toward mail-carrying EVs, even if the transition is particularly messy.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Quantum computing is still rare enough that merely installing a system in a country is a breakthrough, and IBM is taking advantage of that novelty. The company has forged a partnership with the Canadian province of Quebec to install what it says is Canada's first universal quantum computer. The five-year deal will see IBM install a Quantum System One as part of a Quebec-IBM Discovery Accelerator project tackling scientific and commercial challenges. The team-up will see IBM and the Quebec government foster microelectronics work, including progress in chip packaging thanks to an existing IBM facility in the province. The two also plan to show how quantum and classical computers can work together to address scientific challenges, and expect quantum-powered AI to help discover new medicines and materials. IBM didn't say exactly when it would install the quantum computer. However, it will be just the fifth Quantum One installation planned by 2023 following similar partnerships in Germany, Japan, South Korea and the US. Canada is joining a relatively exclusive club, then.

One day, we will all don AR glasses, capable of serving up information geospatially tied to every house and place in our neighborhoods. But who will own and control these spatial AR layers? From a report: It's the stuff of nightmares: The other day, I found my property occupied by a stranger, who was renting it out, Airbnb style. The good news: I'm OK. I wasn't actually evicted from my own home -- at least not in this world. Someone had acquired my property in Upland, a blockchain-powered game that allows people to buy, develop, rent out and sell virtual land parcels based on real-world property borders. It's a bit like Monopoly, played on top of Google Maps, with virtual land speculation happening on a gamified version of the real world. With bright and colorful imagery, and a goofy-looking llama as a mascot, Upland emphasizes that it's all fun and games. That's true for its economy as well, as most of its in-game transactions have little to no monetary value in the real world. The person who bought my property currently makes the equivalent of 4 cents a month in Upland's in-game currency by renting it out to other players.

However, Upland has big ambitions, which include eventually expanding into AR, and providing its data via APIs to third-party developers who may one day be able to build their own game and nongame applications with it. And the company is not alone: A small but growing number of startups and crypto initiatives have begun selling and renting out AR spaces tied to real-world addresses. One day, these efforts could be key to telling your smart glasses which information to display as you look at a famous landmark, or even your neighbor's home. This brings up a ton of questions: Who should have the rights to an AR layer tied to a physical address? What does it mean that these AR properties are being divided up among early adopters before most people even know they exist? Will we see the same issues that have plagued real world real estate, including gentrification and displacement, replicated in AR?

A true "metaverse" may not yet exist, but that hasn't stopped marketers from adopting the buzzword to promote their apps and games on mobile app stores. From a report: According to new data shared today by Sensor Tower, there are now 552 mobile apps that include the term "metaverse" in their apps' titles or descriptions, in hopes of capturing consumer interest in this next evolution of the web. And many of the new additions were added in just the past few months, the firm notes. Across all global apps ranked apps on the App Store and Google Play, a total of 86 apps added references to the "metaverse" to their title or description between November 2021 and January 2022, Sensor Tower's data indicates.

Google today announced a new version of Workspace, the company's productivity service that you probably still refer to as G Suite. With the new -- and free -- Google Workspace Essentials plan, Google wants to bring more business users onto the platform by offering them the basic Workspace productivity tools -- with the exception of Gmail. From a report: Until now, in order to use Workspace with a non-Google email address, you had to sign up for the $6/month/user Business Starter account after a 14-day trial. That paid plan is not going away, but all you now need to do is sign up with your work email and you're good to go. No credit card needed. The new free plan is essentially the existing entry-level Business Starter plan, but with a reduced storage quota of 15 GB (down from 30). Otherwise, though, you can use Google Meet with up to 100 users for up to 60 minutes in each call, get access to Spaces for work collaboration and Chat for gossiping about their co-workers. All of the standard tools like Sheets, Slides and Docs are also included, of course. Since you already have an email address from work, though, there's no Gmail included in this edition, which makes sense, given that it would be tough to send out emails with your work address from there, leading to all kinds of confusion.

A top VR web browser is closing down. Today, Mozilla announced it's shutting down its Firefox Reality browser -- the four-year-old browser built for use in virtual reality environments. The technology had allowed users to access the web from within their VR headset, doing things like visiting URLs, performing searches, and browsing both the 2D and 3D internet using your VR hand controllers, instead of a mouse. From a report: Firefox Reality first launched in fall 2018 and has been available on Viveport, Oculus, Pico, and Hololens platforms through their various app stores. While capable of surfing the 2D web, the expectation was that users would largely use the new technology to browse and interact with the web's 3D content, like 360-degree panoramic images and videos, 3D models, and WebVR games, for example. But in an announcement published today, Mozilla says the browser will be removed from the stores where it's been available for download in the "coming weeks." Mozilla is instead directing users who still want to utilize a web browser in VR to Igalia's upcoming open-source browser, Wolvic, which is based on Firefox Reality's source code. This browser will be available for download starting next week, so users won't have to go without -- they'll just have to make the switch.

The administrators of the Node Package Manager (npm), the largest package repository of the JavaScript ecosystem, said they enrolled the maintainers of the top 100 most popular libraries (based on the number of dependencies) into their mandatory two-factor authentication (2FA) procedure. From a report: npm, which is owned by GitHub, enforced this new security requirement starting yesterday, February 1, 2022. "Maintainers who do not currently have 2FA enabled will have their web sessions revoked and will need to set up 2FA before they can take specific actions with their accounts, such as changing their email address or adding new maintainers to projects," the GitHub security team said in a blog post. The move represents the second phase of a major push from the npm team to secure developer accounts, which have been getting hijacked in recent years and used to push malware inside legitimate JavaScript libraries. In many cases, the accounts are hacked because project maintainers use simple-to-guess passwords or reused passwords that were previously leaked via breaches at other companies. The first phase of this process took place between December 7, 2021, and January 4, 2022, when the npm team rolled out a new feature called "enhanced login verification" for all npm package maintainers.

Since its inception, Facebook's user growth has essentially been up and to the right. But on Wednesday, it reported its first-ever quarterly decline of daily users globally, along with lower-than-expected ad growth that sent its stock plunging roughly 20 percent. From a report: The massive stock drop, which instantly wiped out roughly $200 billion in market value, shows that Facebook's corporate rebrand to Meta isn't enough to distract investors from the problems in its core business of social media. Not only was user growth across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp essentially flat last quarter, but the main Facebook app lost 1 million daily users in North America, where it makes the most money through advertising. That drop led to an overall decrease in daily users of Facebook globally, which a company spokesperson confirmed is the first sequential decline in the company's history. That drop to 1.929 billion daily users from 1.93 billion the prior quarter is likely a reflection of Facebook's increasing lack of relevance with young people.

The nation's first stretch of road to wirelessly charge electric vehicles while they're in motion will begin testing next year in Detroit. Axios reports: "Electrified" roadways, which have wireless charging infrastructure under the asphalt, could keep EVs operating around the clock, with unlimited range -- a big deal for transit buses, delivery vans, long-haul trucks and even future robotaxis. In-road charging could also help pave the way for more widespread EV adoption by relieving consumers of the need to stop and plug in their cars. Electreon Wireless, an Israeli company whose plug-free charging infrastructure is already being tested in Europe, will deploy its first U.S. pilot in Detroit's Michigan Central district, a new mobility innovation hub near downtown. The electrified road, up to a mile long, would allow EVs to charge whether they're stopped or moving, and should be ready for testing in 2023. The state will contribute $1.9 million toward the project, which will also be supported by Ford Motor, DTE Energy and the city of Detroit.

Wireless EV charging systems use magnetic frequency to transfer power from coils buried underground to a receiver pad attached to the car's underbelly. An EV can pull into a designated parking place with an underground charging pad and add electricity the same way a smartphone charges wirelessly. Along an electrified road, vehicles with wireless charging capability can suck up energy as they drive, but for all other cars, it's an ordinary road. Wireless charging can add $3,000 to $4,000 to an already pricey EV, notes Meticulous Research. Electreon, which is working with carmakers to add receivers to their vehicles, aims to get the cost down to $1,000 or $1,500, Stefan Tongur, Electreon's vice president of business development, tells Axios. Users would likely access the feature through a monthly subscription, he noted.

After Alphabet shelved plans to build its own city and wound down the company in charge of the project, a group of former employees is carrying on its legacy. Bloomberg reports: Their startup, Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners LLC, is pursuing ambitious infrastructure projects, including the construction of specialized roads for self-driving cars, a sprawling smart grid project and the implementation of technology to help cities build 5G wireless networks. On Wednesday, the company plans to announce it raised $400 million from StepStone Group Inc., a private-market investment firm whose focuses include infrastructure. The deal values the business, known as SIP, at $1.25 billion, said a person familiar with the terms who asked not to be identified because they're private.

The idea for SIP came from Sidewalk Labs, the smart-city company that Google created in 2015. Sidewalk's flagship project was Quayside, a plan to develop a 12-acre site in Toronto to showcase various high-tech urban ideas. Building a city from scratch made sense as a way for Google's parent company to experiment with urban innovation, said Jonathan Winer, SIP's co-founder and co-chief executive officer. However, "There were a number of infrastructure systems that needed innovation now, not in 10 years," he said. In 2019, he and several other Sidewalk employees left to form SIP with a plan to build large, technically sophisticated projects. Alphabet and the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan funded the effort as its only investors.

[...] SIP is set up in an unusual way for a startup, operating sometimes as a sort of venture capital firm and other times as an operator building projects itself. This allows it to pursue a wider range of projects, Winer said. Among them is a 40-mile highway between Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan, designed for autonomous and connected vehicles. Michigan's state government unveiled the plan in 2020, and Winer said the first stretch of road will open this year. He's in talks with other states about similar developments, he said. SIP has also invested $100 million a project in California that uses smart thermostats and plugs to compensate customers for reducing their energy use at times of high demand. Much of SIP's business involves working with governments. [...] In addition to being an investor, Alphabet is an active participant in several SIP projects. Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car unit, is on the advisory board of the Michigan highway project. Google's Nest thermostats work with the California program. "We benefit tremendously from Alphabet's technology and insight," said Winer. "And sometimes that insight translates into some kind of business transaction."

Disappointed with the lack of US response to the Hermit Kingdom's attacks against US security researchers, one hacker took matters into his own hands. From a report For the past two weeks, observers of North Korea's strange and tightly restricted corner of the internet began to notice that the country seemed to be dealing with some serious connectivity problems. On several different days, practically all of its websites -- the notoriously isolated nation only has a few dozen -- intermittently dropped offline en masse, from the booking site for its Air Koryo airline to Naenara, a page that serves as the official portal for dictator Kim Jong-un's government. At least one of the central routers that allow access to the country's networks appeared at one point to be paralyzed, crippling the Hermit Kingdom's digital connections to the outside world.

Some North Korea watchers pointed out that the country had just carried out a series of missile tests, implying that a foreign government's hackers might have launched a cyberattack against the rogue state to tell it to stop saber-rattling. But responsibility for North Korea's ongoing internet outages doesn't lie with US Cyber Command or any other state-sponsored hacking agency. In fact, it was the work of one American man in a T-shirt, pajama pants, and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks -- and periodically walking over to his home office to check on the progress of the programs he was running to disrupt the internet of an entire country.

Just over a year ago, an independent hacker who goes by the handle P4x was himself hacked by North Korean spies. P4x was just one victim of a hacking campaign that targeted Western security researchers with the apparent aim of stealing their hacking tools and details about software vulnerabilities. He says he managed to prevent those hackers from swiping anything of value from him. But he nonetheless felt deeply unnerved by state-sponsored hackers targeting him personally -- and by the lack of any visible response from the US government. So after a year of letting his resentment simmer, P4x has taken matters into his own hands.

In a tech world still hindered by component shortages, choices have to be made. And in the world of laptops, it seems that choice is Windows-based devices over those running Chrome OS. From a report: IDC on Monday released early data from its latest Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. It pointed to a sharp 63.6 percent decline in Chromebook shipments, which the IDC defines as "shipments to distribution channels or end users, in Q4 2021 (4.8 million shipments) compared to Q4 2020 with (13.1 million shipments)." In addition to market saturation, supply issues also hurt Chromebook shipments, as the industry still struggles with a deficit of PC components, from CPUs to integrated circuits for Wi-Fi modules and power management. "Supply has also been unusually tight for Chromebooks as component shortages have led vendors to prioritize Windows machines due to their higher price tags, further suppressing Chromebook shipments on a global scale," Jitesh Ubrani, research manager with IDC's Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers, said in a statement accompanying Monday's announcement.

Using a novel polymerization process, MIT chemical engineers have created a new material that they say is stronger than steel and as light as plastic, and can be easily manufactured in large quantities. MIT News: The new material is a two-dimensional polymer that self-assembles into sheets, unlike all other polymers, which form one-dimensional, spaghetti-like chains. Until now, scientists had believed it was impossible to induce polymers to form 2D sheets. Such a material could be used as a lightweight, durable coating for car parts or cell phones, or as a building material for bridges or other structures, says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study. "We don't usually think of plastics as being something that you could use to support a building, but with this material, you can enable new things," he says. "It has very unusual properties and we're very excited about that."

The researchers have filed for two patents on the process they used to generate the material, which they describe in a paper appearing today in Nature. MIT postdoc Yuwen Zeng is the lead author of the study. {olymers, which include all plastics, consist of chains of building blocks called monomers. These chains grow by adding new molecules onto their ends. Once formed, polymers can be shaped into three-dimensional objects, such as water bottles, using injection molding. Polymer scientists have long hypothesized that if polymers could be induced to grow into a two-dimensional sheet, they should form extremely strong, lightweight materials. However, many decades of work in this field led to the conclusion that it was impossible to create such sheets. One reason for this was that if just one monomer rotates up or down, out of the plane of the growing sheet, the material will begin expanding in three dimensions and the sheet-like structure will be lost. However, in the new study, Strano and his colleagues came up with a new polymerization process that allows them to generate a two-dimensional sheet called a polyaramide. For the monomer building blocks, they use a compound called melamine, which contains a ring of carbon and nitrogen atoms. Under the right conditions, these monomers can grow in two dimensions, forming disks. These disks stack on top of each other, held together by hydrogen bonds between the layers, which make the structure very stable and strong.