This morning’s SpaceX launch went off without a hitch, sending a Dragon capsule into orbit for a rendezvous with the International Space Station. It marks the latest in a string of successful launches for Elon Musk’s company. However, the experimental portion of the launch—an attempt to land the Falcon 9 launch vehicle on a barge—did not work out so well.

Rocket made it to drone spaceport ship, but landed hard. Close, but no cigar this time. Bodes well for the future tho.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 10, 2015

Musk went on to say that this was hard enough to trash some of the support equipment on the barge, though the barge itself will be back for the next attempt. No video is currently available, as the landing attempt took place in the dark and fog. Musk joked that they’ll “piece it together from telemetry and … actual pieces.”

Securing Macs against stealthy malware infections could get more complicated thanks to a new proof-of-concept exploit that allows attackers with brief physical access to covertly replace the firmware of most machines built since 2011.

Once installed, the bootkit—that is, malware that replaces the firmware that is normally used to boot Macs—can control the system from the very first instruction. That allows the malware to bypass firmware passwords, passwords users enter to decrypt hard drives and to preinstall backdoors in the operating system before it starts running. Because it’s independent of the operating system and hard drive, it will survive both reformatting and OS reinstallation. And since it replaces the digital signature Apple uses to ensure only authorized firmware runs on Macs, there are few viable ways to disinfect infected boot systems. The proof-of-concept is the first of its kind on the OS X platform. While there are no known instances of bootkits for OS X in the wild, there is currently no way to detect them, either.

The malware has been dubbed Thunderstrike, because it spreads through maliciously modified peripheral devices that connect to a Mac’s Thunderbolt interface. When plugged into a Mac that’s in the process of booting up, the device injects what’s known as an Option ROM into the extensible firmware interface (EFI), the firmware responsible for starting a Mac’s system management mode and enabling other low-level functions before loading the OS. The Option ROM replaces the RSA encryption key Macs use to ensure only authorized firmware is installed. From there, the Thunderbolt device can install malicious firmware that can’t easily be removed by anyone who doesn’t have the new key.

As features on chips get smaller, we’re edging closer to where we bump up against basic physics, which dictates that the behavior of wiring will become unpredictable once the number of atoms involved gets small enough. As a result, there’s been some preliminary work done on producing processor components out of single molecules, like carbon nanotubes.

But it’s not just processors we care about. As features of flash memory shrink, we’ll eventually run up against a similar problem: the locations where electrons are stored will be too small to hold sufficient charge for the device to actually work. Fortunately, it looks like molecules may be able to help us out here, as well. Researchers are reporting that they’ve designed a combination of two molecules that can hold electrons for use as flash memory.

This isn’t the first advance in single-molecule flash memory. Last year, researchers reported building a flash device that included layers of graphene and molybdenum disulfide, both of which form molecular sheets a single atom thick. But these devices required several layers of these materials to work, so the charge ended up stored in several stacked sheets of graphene.