Science & TechnologyS


Top Secret

Thousands of firms trade confidential data with the US government in exchange for classified intelligence

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Fri, 14 Jun 2013 16:12 UTC
nsa prism
© n/a
The rabbit hole just got deeper. A whole lot deeper.

On Sunday we predicated that "there's one reason why the administration, James Clapper and the NSA should just keep their mouths shut as the PRISM-gate fallout escalates: with every incremental attempt to refute some previously unknown facet of the US Big Brother state, a new piece of previously unleaked information from the same intelligence organization now scrambling for damage control, emerges and exposes the brand new narrative as yet another lie, forcing even more lies, more retribution against sources, more journalist persecution and so on."

And like a hole that just gets deeper the more you dug and exposes ever more dirt, tonight's installment revealing one more facet of the conversion of a once great republic into a great fascist, "big brother" state, comes from Bloomberg which reports that "thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the process said."
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Info

Atomic weights tweaked for 5 elements

Megan Gannon
LiveScience
Fri, 14 Jun 2013 14:34 UTC
Periodic Table
© T. B. Coplen (U.S. Geological Survey)This is how carbon looks on a revised periodic table that uses intervals for the standard atomic weights of some elements.
Standard atomic weights, those numbers emblazoned under the elements on the periodic table, were once thought of as unchanging constants of nature.

But researchers have tweaked the atomic weights of five elements - magnesium, bromine, germanium, indium and mercury - in a new table published by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).

To calculate standard atomic weight, scientists have traditionally averaged the weights of the stable variations of an element known as isotopes.

All atoms of an element have the same atomic number, or number of protons in their nuclei, but the number of neutrons in the nuclei can vary, leading some isotopes to be lighter or heavier. Carbon-12, for example, the most abundant carbon isotope, has six protons and six neutrons. Its slightly heavier cousin, carbon-13, has six protons and seven neutrons.

Standard atomic weight also depends on how common an element's stable isotopes are. In other words, the more plentiful an isotope, the more it will influence the average. But the abundance of an isotope can also vary from place to place on Earth, leading to differences in an element's atomic weight depending on its context.

For that reason, the atomic weights of magnesium and bromine will now be expressed as intervals with upper and lower bounds instead of single values. The atomic weight of bromine, for instance, is commonly thought to be 79.904, but it can actually range between 79.901 and 79.907, depending on where the element is found.
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Sun

Nearby flare star gives off explosive burst of light

Brett Smith
RedOrbit
Fri, 14 Jun 2013 13:45 UTC
Flare Star
© Casey Reed/NASA
Within a span of three minutes, a star in the Usra Major constellation less than 16 light-years from Earth gave off a massive flare, making the object 15 times brighter than normal, according to a new report in the journal Astrophysics.

The star, known as WX UMa, is a so-called flare star, a class of stars which can become 100 times or more brighter within a few seconds or minutes. These flares appear to be randomly occurring, and the stars return to their normal state tens of minutes after the event.

"We recorded a strong flare of the star WX UMa, which became almost 15 times brighter in a matter of 160 seconds," said report co-author Vakhtang Tamazian, an astrophysicist at the University of Santiago de Compostela.

WX UMa is part of a binary system with a companion star that shines almost 100 times brighter, except during WX UMa flare events. The event described in the report was observed from the Byurakan Observatory in Armenia.

"During this period of less than three minutes the star underwent an abrupt change ... from a temperature of 2,800 kelvin to six or seven times more than that," Tamazian noted.

While scientists currently do not know how to predict these flares, they do know how they develop.
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Info

Leprosy remarkably unchanged from medieval times

Tanya Lewis
LiveScience
Thu, 13 Jun 2013 13:00 UTC
Skull with Leprosy
© University of WinchesterLeprosy causes deformities of the skull, seen in this medieval skull from Winchester, UK.
Leprosy is much less common today than it was during the Middle Ages, but the bacterium that causes this debilitating disease has hardly changed since then, a new study finds.

Researchers sequenced the surprisingly well-preserved genome of the leprosy bacterium in skeletons exhumed from medieval graves in Europe. It's the first time an ancient genome has been sequenced "from scratch" (without a reference genome), and reveals that medieval leprosy strains were nearly identical to modern leprosy strains.

Leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease, is due to a chronic infection of the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae. The disease causes skin lesions that can permanently damage the skin, nerves, eyes and limbs.

While it doesn't cause body parts to fall off, those infected with leprosy can become deformed as a result of secondary infections. The disease often strikes during the peak reproductive years, but it develops very slowly, and can take 25 to 30 years for symptoms to appear.

The disease was extremely common in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, especially in southern Scandinavia. "It was a major public health problem," said study co-author Jesper Boldsen, a biological anthropologist at the University of Southern Denmark.

But leprosy declined precipitously during the 16th century. To understand why, Boldsen's colleagues sequenced DNA from five medieval skeletons, and from biopsies of living people with leprosy.
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Fireball 4

City-destroying asteroid flashes Earth with just one day's notice

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:39 UTC
Asteroid 2013 LR6
© JPL Small Body DatabaseOrbit diagram of Asteroid 2013 LR6.
A truck-sized asteroid just discovered yesterday (Thursday, June 6) will give Earth a relatively close shave later today/early tomorrow, depending on your time zone. Asteroid 2013 LR6 is somewhere between 5- 16 meters (16 to 54 feet) in diameter and will be flying by at only about 111,000 kilometers (69,000 mi, 0.29x Lunar Distances) from Earth at 4:43UTC/12:43AM EDT on June 8, 2013.

This is similar in size to the space rock that exploded over Russia back in February of this year. The Russian asteroid was about 15 meters (50 feet) in diameter before it exploded in an airburst event about 20-25 km (12-15 miles) above Earth's surface.

Find out how you can watch the flyby live online, below.
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Black Cat 2

'Could you clean my litter tray?' Leading expert says we'll have the technology to communicate with our pets within 10 years

Rachel Reilly
Daily Mail
Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:59 UTC
  • Animal behaviour expert Professor Con Slobodchikoff is developing technology that can translate the complex calls of prairie dogs
  • He says that in 5 to 10 years, similar software could be available to have conversations with farm animals, lions and tigers and even pets
  • Said that pets will be able to tell owners what they want for dinner and that being able to talk with dogs could help treat behavioural problems
We will one day be able to talk to animals using mobile phone-sized gadgets, says a leading expert in animal behaviour.

Professor Con Slobodchikoff is developing new technology that interprets the calls of the prairie dog and says the technology could eventually be used to interpret other animals.

He also suggested that the technology could one day be fine-tuned to enable humans to talk back to animals and engage in conversation.
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Galaxy

Trove of black holes discovered in Andromeda galaxy

Clara Moskowitz
SPACE.com
Wed, 12 Jun 2013 18:22 UTC
Andromeda galaxy
© X-ray (NASA/CXC/SAO/R.Barnard, Z.Lee et al.), Optical (NOAO/AURA/NSF/REU Prog./B.Schoening, V.Harvey; Descubre Fndn./CAHA/OAUV/DSA/V.Peris)26 new black hole candidates have been spotted in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.
Astronomers have discovered 26 new likely black holes in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy - the largest haul of black hole candidates ever found in a galaxy apart from our own.

Black holes, which emit almost no light themselves, can be seen only by the light given off by material falling into them. The supermassive black holes that populate the centers of most galaxies are easy to spot because their surroundings are so bright, but much smaller stellar mass black holes are considerably harder to find.

The 26 new candidates, in combination with nine previously discovered black holes in Andromeda, bring the known tally in that galaxy to 35.

"While we are excited to find so many black holes in Andromeda, we think it's just the tip of the iceberg," Robin Barnard, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said in a statement. "Most black holes won't have close companions and will be invisible to us."

Most of the newfound black holes have about five to 10 times the mass of our sun, and resulted from the deaths of giant stars. Seven of the new candidates were found within 1,000 light-years of the center of the Andromeda galaxy - more than the number of black holes near the core of our own Milky Way.

"We are particularly excited to see so many black hole candidates this close to the center, because we expected to see them and have been searching for years," Barnard said.
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Info

New kind of variable star discovered


European Southern Observatory
Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:03 UTC
Variable Star
© ESO
Astronomers using the Swiss 1.2-metre Euler telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile have found a new type of variable star. The discovery was based on the detection of very tiny changes in brightness of stars in a cluster. The observations revealed previously unknown properties of these stars that defy current theories and raise questions about the origin of the variations.

The Swiss are justly famed for their craftsmanship when creating extremely precise pieces of technology. Now a Swiss team from the Geneva Observatory has achieved extraordinary precision using a comparatively small 1.2-metre telescope for an observing programme stretching over many years. They have discovered a new class of variable stars by measuring minute variations in stellar brightness.

The new results are based on regular measurements of the brightness of more than three thousand stars in the open star cluster NGC 3766 [1] over a period of seven years. They reveal how 36 of the cluster's stars followed an unexpected pattern - they had tiny regular variations in their brightness at the level of 0.1% of the stars' normal brightness. These variations had periods between about two and 20 hours. The stars are somewhat hotter and brighter than the Sun, but otherwise apparently unremarkable. The new class of variable stars is yet to be given a name.
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Eye 1

New layer of human eye found

Sheila M. Eldred
Discovery News
Tue, 11 Jun 2013 11:48 UTC
Eye
© Discovery News
Ophthalmology textbooks describe five layers of the human cornea. They'll have to be rewritten, says University of Nottingham Professor Harminder Dua, who recently discovered a sixth layer.

"Having identified this new and distinct layer deep in the tissue of the cornea, we can now exploit its presence to make operations much safer and simpler for patients," she said in a press release.

"From a clinical perspective, there are many diseases that affect the back of the cornea which clinicians across the world are already beginning to relate to the presence, absence or tear in this layer."
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Network

Why PRISM is a cloud killer

Jonny Evans
ComputerWorld
Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:25 UTC
iTunes Match
© iTunesThere's more to cloud services than iTunes Match.

The migration from desktop computing to the cloud is on every tech firm's playlist this season, with Apple [AAPL] expected to deliver improvements to its iCloud service later today -- but recent revelations regarding the US government's PRISM surveillance technology could be the kiss of death to these future tech promises.

Security is essential

Think about it: In order for cloud computing solutions to be seen as viable alternatives to more traditional desktop solutions users -- personal and business users alike -- need to be 100 percent certain their data is secure.

It is unlikely too many people want their privacy curtailed in exchange for convenience -- and reports claiming the US can pretty much tap into a user's personal data and information from any PRISM-enabled system installed in locations worldwide undermines expectation of secure data in the cloud.
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