Science & TechnologyS


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Stuxnet Worm is the "Work of a National Government Agency"

Josh Halliday
The Guardian, UK
Fri, 24 Sep 2010 09:35 UTC
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© SymantecGraph shows concentration of Stuxnet-infected computers in Iran as of August.
Malware believed to be targeting Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant may have been created by Israeli hackers

A computer worm which targets industrial and factory systems is almost certainly the work of a national government agency, security experts told the Guardian - but warn that it will be near-impossible to identify the culprit.

The "Stuxnet" computer worm, which has been described as one of the "most refined pieces of malware ever discovered", has been most active in Iran, says the security company Symantec - leading some experts to conjecture that the likely target of the virus is the controversial Bushehr nuclear power plant, and that it was created by Israeli hackers.

Speaking to the Guardian, security experts confirmed that Stuxnet is a targeted attack on industrial locations in specific countries, the sophistication of which takes it above and beyond previous attacks of a similar nature.
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Stormtrooper

Fraunhofer boffins develop 'Titanium foam' endoskeletal implants

Lewis Page
The Register
Fri, 24 Sep 2010 03:48 UTC
Vorsprung durch bendo-Materialforschung

Titanium - it's everywhere these days, long having spread beyond its initial uses in aerospace. Fruitbite laptops are cased in it, high-end tools and cutlery are made from it, there's even jewellery.

titaniumfoam
© The RegisterThe latest in foamalloy endoskeletons.
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Display

IBM 'one atom, one bit' storage breakthrough

Rik Myslewski
The Register
Fri, 24 Sep 2010 03:44 UTC
Is that a terabyte in your pocket, or...?

If you've been hankering for a multi-terabyte USB thumb drive, you may be in luck: IBM scientists have developed a technique that could - eventually - help increase data-storage densities by orders of magnitude.

The breakthrough, announced Friday, allows researchers to measure how long a bit of information can be retained in an individual atom. It does so by capturing, recording, and visualizing the magnetic properties of that atom in real time.

Using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to essentially record a "movie" of an atom's magnetic behavior, that behavior can now be analyzed at frame rates one million times faster than before, according to researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San José, California - down to a nanosecond time frame.

And as Andreas Heinrich, a physicist at the Almaden center pointed out: "To put this in perspective, one nanosecond to one second is the equivalent of one second to 30 years."
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Laptop

ZoneAlarm caught using fake antivirus scare tactics

Emil Protalinski
Ars Technica
Wed, 22 Sep 2010 20:28 UTC
Check Point, a security company that offers various products to protect consumers and businesses, is imitating the tactics of fake antimalware programs. Over the last few days, ZoneAlarm users have been receiving a warning from their security software that tells them they are not protected against a new piece of malware. The warning is titled a "Global Virus Alert," shows "Your PC may be in danger!" in bright red, and urges the user to "SEE THREAT DETAILS" and "GET PROTECTION." The prompt is very poorly designed: it looks a lot like malware masquerading as an antivirus (in fact, we would say that newer fake antimalware prompts are more believable than ZoneAlarm's warning).

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Exhibit A: The alarmist Zone Alarm prompt
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Sun

Egyptian Sunset and Sunspots


Space Weather
Sun, 26 Sep 2010 13:14 UTC
On Sept. 24th in Giza, Egypt, Aymen Ibrahem positioned himself in front of the Pyramid of King Khephren to photograph the sunset. "Every year, just after the autumnal equinox, the sun sets directly behind the east-west aligned Sphinx," he explains. "I knew it would be a great photo-op." His pictures, however, revealed more than he expected.
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© Aymen Ibrahem

"When I took a close look at the images, I found two sunspots," he says. Indeed, sunspots 1108 and 1109 are large enough to see without the amplification of a solar telescope. "Drifting clouds and the dusty air lowered the brightness of the sun enough for me to capture them using nothing more than my camera (a Sony DSC H5)."
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Camera

Triple Rainbows


Space Weather
Sun, 26 Sep 2010 13:09 UTC
Double rainbows are commonplace. Sunlight reflected once inside raindrops produces the primary arc; sunlight reflected twice produces the secondary. Most people who have seen a single rainbow, have also seen a double.

But have you ever seen a triple? Daryl Pederson of Anchorage, Alaska, spotted one on Sept. 20th:

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© Daryl Pederson
"Here's something you don't see every day--three rainbows at once!" says Pederson. "The bonus third rainbow was caused by an image of the sun reflected from Potter's Marsh into the falling rain above."
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Meteor

Mini-Ice Age Debate Rocking Geology World: Do Comets Cause Ice Ages?


The Montreal Gazette
Sat, 11 Sep 2010 00:00 UTC
Comets are believed by some experts to have wiped out megafauna species

The normally peaceable world of geology is currently alive with a fiery debate over the theory that deadly space rocks slammed into Northern Canada about 13,000 years ago, triggering a mini-Ice Age and the eventual extinction of the woolly mammoth and a host of other prehistoric species.

That contentious hypothesis - which has prompted a number of studies in recent years probing sites throughout North America for traces of the alleged extraterrestrial blast -is under renewed attack after a team of U.S. and British researchers published a paper last week arguing that previous claims of impact evidence are demonstrably mistaken.

The new study takes particular aim at several supposed discoveries of "nanodiamonds" at sites around North America -hailed by advocates of the impact theory as proof that a cosmic blast sent showers of "shocked" rock particles across the continent 13,000 years ago.
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Meteor

Chilled Diamonds Shine Light on Comet Collision

Nader Heidari
Daily Nexus
Thu, 16 Sep 2010 09:25 UTC
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© James KennettJames Kennett, along with ETH Zurich researcher Gerald Haug, cut into the ice sheet in Greenland to retrieve samples from the glacial layers. The ice sheets serve as a striated window into the Earth’s past.
Scientists Brave Icy Environment to Find Evidence of Cosmic Cataclysm

A grueling journey across the ice sheets of Greenland has paid off for a team of scientists, who have located some diamonds in the rough glacial climate.

The 21-person team, which included UCSB professor emeritus James Kennett and his son, University of Oregon geology professor Douglas Kennett, recently published a paper in the Journal of Glaciology on their discovery of nano-sized diamonds in the ice sheet in a location near the city of Kangerlussuaq.

According to James Kennett, the expedition involved traversing a good amount of difficult terrain, as the ice sheets of Greenland are significantly remote.

"The area is cold, remote and [mostly] inaccessible," James Kennett said. "Looking for a potential layer of diamonds in an ice sheet is like trying to find a needle in a haystack."
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Sun

Solar Storms Can Change Directions, Surprising Forecasters

Dr. Tony Phillips
Science@NASA
Tue, 21 Sep 2010 09:16 UTC
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© NASA A coronal mass ejection (CME) observed by STEREO on Dec. 12, 2008.
Solar storms don't always travel in a straight line. But once they start heading in our direction, they can accelerate rapidly, gathering steam for a harder hit on Earth's magnetic field.

So say researchers who have been using data from NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft to unravel the 3D structure of solar storms. Their findings are presented in today's issue of Nature Communications.

"This really surprised us," says co-author Peter Gallagher of Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. "Solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) can start out going one way - and then turn in a different direction."

The result was so strange, at first they thought they'd done something wrong. After double- and triple-checking their work on dozens of eruptions, however, the team knew they were onto something.

"Our 3D visualizations clearly show that solar storms can be deflected from high solar latitudes and end up hitting planets they might otherwise have missed," says lead author Jason Byrne, a graduate student at the Trinity Center for High Performance Computing.
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Meteor

Flashback Comets and the Bronze Age Collapse

Bob Kobres
Society for Interdisciplinary Studies - Chronology and Catastrophism Workshop
Sun, 26 Jan 1992 00:00 UTC
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© Unknown
. . . and from heaven a great star shall fall on the dread ocean and burn up the deep sea, with Babylon itself and the land of Italy, by reason of which many of the Hebrews perished,

. . . Be afraid, ye Indians and high-hearted Ethiopians: for when the fiery wheel of the ecliptic(?) . . . and Capricorn . . . and Taurus among the Twins encircles the mid-heaven, when the Virgin ascending and the Sun fastening the girdle round his forehead dominates the whole firmament; there shall be a great conflagration from the sky, falling on the earth;
Are these lines from Book V of the Sibylline Oracles eschatological nonsense? Contemporary astronomical evidence suggests a historic basis for words describing cosmic calamity. British astronomers, Victor Clube and Bill Napier, in The Cosmic Winter (1990) and other recent works, provide students of the past with newly discovered celestial clues which indicate that Earth has been periodically pelleted with comet fragments throughout the Holocene period. The evidence for the break-up of a large (> 50 km), short period (approximately 3.3 years), Earth-orbit-crossing comet is substantial and should be considered as hard as anything a trowel might turn up. What astronomical information cannot convey is the actual effect these periodic bombardment episodes had on human culture; only further digging and sifting will illuminate that aspect.
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