Science & TechnologyS


Sun

Two Suns? Twin Stars Could Be Visible From Earth By 2012

Dean Praetorius
The Huffington Post
Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:33 UTC
Two Suns
© The Huffington Post/AP
Earth could be getting a second sun, at least temporarily.

Dr. Brad Carter, Senior Lecturer of Physics at the University of Southern Queensland, outlined the scenario to news.com.au. Betelgeuse, one of the night sky's brightest stars, is losing mass, indicating it is collapsing. It could run out of fuel and go super-nova at any time.

When that happens, for at least a few weeks, we'd see a second sun, Carter says. There may also be no night during that timeframe.

The Star Wars-esque scenario could happen by 2012, Carter says... or it could take longer. The explosion could also cause a neutron star or result in the formation of a black hole 1300 light years from Earth, reports news.com.au.

But doomsday sayers should be careful about speculation on this one. If the star does go super-nova, Earth will be showered with harmless particles, according to Carter. "They will flood through the Earth and bizarrely enough, even though the supernova we see visually will light up the night sky, 99 per cent of the energy in the supernova is released in these particles that will come through our bodies and through the Earth with absolutely no harm whatsoever," he told news.com.au.
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Meteor

Multiple Asteroid Strikes May Have Killed Mars' Magnetic Field

Lisa Grossman
Wired.com
Thu, 20 Jan 2011 13:01 UTC
Mars Impact
© NASA

Once upon a time, Mars had a magnetic field, just like Earth. Four billion years ago, it vanished, taking with it the planet's chances of evolving life as we know it. Now scientists have proposed a new explanation for its disappearance.

A model of asteroids striking the red planet suggests that, while no single impact would have short-circuited the dynamo that powered its magnetism, a quick succession of 20 asteroid strikes could have done the job.

"Each one crippled a little bit," said geophysicist Jafar Arkani-Hamed of the University of Toronto, author of the new study. "We believe those were enough to cripple, cripple, cripple, cripple until it killed all of the dynamo forever."

Rocky planets like Earth, Mars, Mercury and even the moon get their magnetic fields from the movement of molten iron inside their cores, a process called convection. Packets of molten iron rise, cool and sink within the core, and generate an electric current. The planet's spinning turns that current into a magnetic field in a system known as a dynamo.
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Magnify

Researchers Observe DNA-RNA Transcription Process Directly for the First Time

Tiffany Kaiser
DailyTech
Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:01 UTC
Image
© University of California, San Francisco
Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco have combined advanced computer technology, DNA-sequencing technology and biochemical techniques to create a new method of observing how cells convert DNA into RNA, and ultimately discovered what makes genes turn on and off.

Jonathan Weissman, Ph.D., study leader and a professor in the UCSF Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, and L. Stirling Churchman, Ph.D., of the UCSF Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology as well as the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, have developed a new method of understanding the information held in an organism's genome in order to figure out how cells read DNA to create RNA as well as turn on and off.

"The genome is the hard drive of the cell," said Churchman. "Until now, we've been able to see the information that the hard drive contains as well as see the result after the cell has read that information, but we didn't know which precise data it was accessing. Here, we've been able to see which data it is accessing, with a high enough resolution to also be able to see how it's actually working."
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Sherlock

US: 1811 wreck of Perry ship discovered off Rhode Island

Michelle R. Smith
Associated Press
Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:59 UTC
Image
© AP Photo/Tom PackerThis Nov. 10, 2006 photo provided on Jan. 6, 2011 by Charles Buffum, shows a submerged cannon that a team of divers say is one of the remains of the U.S.S. Revenge, a ship commanded by U.S. Navy hero Oliver Hazard Perry. The ship was wrecked in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Rhode Island on Jan. 9, 1811
A team of divers say they've discovered the remains of the USS Revenge, a ship commanded by U.S. Navy hero Oliver Hazard Perry and wrecked off Rhode Island in 1811.

Perry is known for defeating the British in the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie off the shores of Ohio, Michigan and Ontario in the War of 1812 and for the line "We have met the enemy and they are ours." His battle flag bore the phrase "Don't give up the ship," and to this day is a symbol of the Navy.

The divers, Charles Buffum, a brewery owner from Stonington, Conn., and Craig Harger, a carbon dioxide salesman from Colchester, Conn., say the wreck changed the course of history because Perry likely would not have been sent to Lake Erie otherwise. Sunday is the 200th anniversary of the wreck.

Buffum said he's been interested in finding the remains of the Revenge ever since his mother several years ago gave him the book Shipwrecks on the Shores of Westerly. The book includes Perry's account of the wreck, which happened when it hit a reef in a storm in heavy fog off Watch Hill in Westerly as Perry was bringing the ship from Newport to New London, Conn.
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Telescope

Wolf Moon Rising


Space Weather
Thu, 20 Jan 2011 08:10 UTC
Last night, Jan. 19th, as photographer Laurent Laveder was positioning his camera in front of the Tronoen Chapel in Brittany, France, he received a text message from his stepdaughter Manon. "Look at the Moon! :o)" she typed. "She didn't know I already was!" says Laveder. Click here to view the movie he recorded, entitled Wolf Moon Rising:

Image
© Laurent Laveder
It's called the Wolf Moon because of folklore: northern Native Americans named it after packs of singing wolves they once heard during the winter month of January. "For years, I've been meaning to catch the Wolf Moon rising," says Laveder. "I'm glad I finally did!"
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Radar

Report: ZDNet's Danchev Hospitalized?

Paul Roberts
ThreatPost
Mon, 17 Jan 2011 04:34 UTC
The mystery surrounding noted security researcher and blogger Dancho Danchev continued on Monday, after reports from Bulgaria suggested that Danchev may be confined to a hospital in the country.

The unconfirmed report comes by way of Dnevnik.org, a Bulgarian online publication, which cites two unnamed sources as confirming that Danchev has been hospitalized since December 11, 2010. Danchev is now "stabalized and will soon be discharged," Dnevnik reports. The report did not say why Danchev had been hospitalized.

Threatpost reported on Friday that Danchev, a frequent blogger on computer security for ZDNet.com's Zero Day blog, has been missing since early September. Regular posts to his personal blog and Zero Day ceased. During that time, he has been offline and unreachable by phone or e-mail, though he appears to have been using Twitter through late October.
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Network

Wikipedia: You Still Can't Trust It

Lance Ulanoff
PC Mag
Fri, 14 Jan 2011 03:57 UTC
wikipediaprivacy
© PC Mag
Wikipedia, the world's largest user-generated online encyclopedia is 10. Sometimes it's hard to believe anything on the web could be 10 years old. In human years, 10 is but a pup: a small, gangly thing with too large hands and feet. Old enough to sense the onset of teenage-dom, but still too young to see the world as it really is. Knowing the difference between fact and fiction, for instance, can be particularly difficult at this age--and in this one way, Wikipedia is still a lot like that prepubescent child.

Six years ago, I pondered whether Wikipedia was in fact dangerous. So much information, so many people using it as a source, and so much potential for misuse. When I wrote the story, the site was being roiled by a fresh controversy. One man had, as a joke, written a fake biography of journalist John Seigenthaler. The entry included nonsense about him and the John F Kennedy assassination. The post author lost his job and Wikipedia ended up with a black eye. Up until then, it seems as if no one realized how easy it was for anyone to enter virtually anything in the information Wiki.
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Network

Age of surveillance: the fish is rotting from its head


Non-Linear Response
Fri, 14 Jan 2011 03:49 UTC
On 19th of December, 2010 elections were held in Belarus, my dear home country. The apparent popularity of opposition candidates was met with a crackdown. Seven out of nine presidential candidates were thrown to jail, some of them maimed in the process. A peaceful street protest of tens of thousands was brutally dispersed, with many hundreds beaten and arrested. All NGOs and political parties shut down, with human rights activists dragged to courts.

While none of it really was new for this long abused nation, some things surfaced for the first time. The Great Belarussian Firewall debuted, shutting down SSL connections, blocking major social media websites and replacing opposition news outlets with fake dummies. Traditional wiretapping of phone networks was combined with GSM location services: thousands of people are now getting subpoenas and are dragged to police stations for being on streets in the vicinity of protests.
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Bug

Lame Stuxnet worm 'full of errors', says security consultant

John Leyden
The Register
Wed, 19 Jan 2011 03:42 UTC
Far from being cyber-spy geniuses with ninja-like black-hat coding skills, the developers of Stuxnet made a number of mistakes that exposed their malware to earlier detection and meant the worm spread more widely than intended.

Stuxnet, the infamous worm that infected SCADA-based computer control systems, is sometimes described as the world's first cyber-security weapon. It managed to infect facilities tied to Iran's controversial nuclear programme before re-programming control systems to spin up high-speed centrifuges and slow them down, inducing more failures than normal as a result. The malware used rootkit-style functionality to hide its presence on infected systems. In addition, Stuxnet made use of four zero-day Windows exploits as well as stolen digital certificates.

All this failed to impress security consultant Tom Parker, who told the Black Hat DC conference on Tuesday that the developers of Stuxnet had made several mistakes. For one thing, the command-and-control mechanisms used by the worm were inelegant, not least because they sent commands in the clear. The worm spread widely across the net, something Parker argued was ill-suited for the presumed purpose of the worm as a mechanism for targeted computer sabotage. Lastly, the code-obfuscation techniques were lame.
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Display

Facebook suspends personal data-sharing feature

John Leyden
The Register
Tue, 18 Jan 2011 03:38 UTC
Developers kicked back out of your undie drawer

Facebook has "temporarily disabled" a controversial feature that allowed developers to access the home address and mobile numbers of users.

The social network suspended the feature, introduced on Friday, after only three days. The decision follows feedback from users that the sharing of data process wasn't clearly explained and criticism from security firms that the feature was ripe for abuse.

Individual users had to grant permission before developers could hook into the API on Facebook's platform. However, because many users often click through permission dialogue boxes without paying attention, concerns were raised by net security firms such as Sophos that the feature might make life easier for the developers of rogue applications.
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