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Einstein

Marko Casalan, 8, is officially world's youngest IT whizz

Bojan Pancevski
Times Online
Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:47 UTC
Marko
© Bojan Pancevski
Marko is deemed the Mozart of Computers by the Macedonian press after passing Microsoft's exams for IT professionals
While the other elementary school pupils skim through their comics in the break between classes, Marko Calasan takes out his copy of Implementing and Administering Security in a Microsoft Windows Server Network for a light read.

At the age of 8, Marko has become the world's youngest certified computer system administrator and was deemed the Mozart of Computers by the press after passing exams for IT professionals with the computer giant Microsoft.

In theory, he could now get a job maintaining complex office computer networks, even though he has not yet completed the third grade in his native town Skopje, in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

"The Microsoft officials gave me computer games and DVDs with cartoons when I passed the exams because I am a child. That was nice, but I'm not really interested in those things," young Marko told The Times.
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Evil Rays

Satellite Antenna Enables Discovery Of Buried Glaciers On Mars


Mars Daily
Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:43 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The Italian Space Agency's SHAllow RADar (SHARAD) instrument.

Antenna technology designed and built by Northrop Grumman made it possible for a radar sounder instrument aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to detect huge glaciers on the Red Planet covered by a layer of dust and rocks.

The antenna was developed by Astro Aerospace, a business unit of Northrop Grumman's Aerospace Systems sector, for the Italian Space Agency's SHAllow RADar (SHARAD) instrument. SHARAD probes below the Martian surface using radar waves in the 15-25 MHz frequency band for high-depth resolution.

Scientists analyze the reflection of radar waves to characterize the Martian surface and subsurface layers of rocks, dust and ice. A radar capable of seeing deeply requires a very large antenna such as SHARAD's, which is 10 meters (32.8 feet) in length but weighs less than three kilograms (6.6 lbs).
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Saturn

Smallest Exoplanet Has 1.4 Earth Masses

Tudor Vieru
Softpedia
Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:46 UTC
Exoplanet
© Wikimedia Commons
The smallest exoplanet now known has 1.4 Earth masses.
Not all of them are large gas giants.

Astronomers have managed to discover the first exoplanet that features a mass roughly similar to that of our own planet. The new celestial body, dubbed MOA-2007-BLG-192-L b, was originally believed to weigh 3.3 Earth masses, but new research conducted on the star it orbits proves the old theory wrong. According to the new estimates, the planet is the most similar to Earth in terms of weight and size, except maybe for Venus. Scientists don't yet know if it can sustain life, and there are some theories as to how its surface may look. They all depend on what type of star it's orbiting.

Original calculations showed that a brown dwarf was at the center of the solar system, a very small star that could not sustain nuclear fusion, as regular stars, including our Sun, did. However, by analyzing the system with a new technique called microlensing, astronomers have managed to determine that the body is in fact a red dwarf, which automatically implies that the planet orbiting it is a lot smaller than first thought. The new figures reduce its mass from 3.3 to 1.4 that of the Earth.
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Meteor

Natural disasters doomed early Peruvian civilization 3,600 years ago


Associated Press
Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:50 UTC
Nature turned against one of America's early civilizations 3,600 years ago, when researchers say earthquakes and floods, followed by blowing sand, drove away residents of an area that is now in Peru. "This maritime farming community had been successful for over 2,000 years, they had no incentive to change, and then all of a sudden, boom, they just got the props knocked out from under them," anthropologist Mike Moseley of the University of Florida said in a statement.

Moseley and colleagues were studying civilization of the Supe Valley along the Peruvian coast, which was established up to 5,800 years ago.

Comment: Earthquakes, floods and winds - yet no mention of the most obvious explanation for all these phenomena: a cometary impact.

See Laura Knight-Jadczyk's Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets: Damages, Disasters, Injuries, Deaths, and Very Close Calls.

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Satellite

First images of Moon's hidden craters

Stephanie Stohr
Cosmos
Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:35 UTC
Moon craters
© ISRO/NASA/JHUAPL/LPI/Cornell University/Smithsonian
Never seen before: The image shows a radar strip overlain over an Earth-based, Arecibo Observatory radar telescope image of the Moon's surface. Taken Nov. 17, 2008, the radar strip shows a part of the Moon never seen before: a portion of Haworth crater that is permanently shadowed from Earth and the Sun. The only way to explore these regions is by using an orbital radar such as the Mini-SAR.
Sydney - An orbiting Indian probe is sending back the first radar images of mysterious, previously hidden craters near the poles of the Moon.

India's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, has captured the images with the help of a NASA-built radar device that is part of the probe's suite of scientific instruments.

The imaging technique can detect features as small as 150 metres wide, and is being used to map the dark side of the Moon and search for evidence of water ice.
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Sherlock

Ancient Persians 'Gassed Romans'

Tanya Syed
BBC News
Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:44 UTC
Remains
© Yale University
Remains in the city wall suggest toxic gases were used in a siege on the city.
Ancient Persians were the first to use chemical warfare against their enemies, a study has suggested.

A UK researcher said he found evidence that the Persian Empire used poisonous gases on the Roman city of Dura, Eastern Syria, in the 3rd Century AD.

The theory is based on the discovery of remains of about 20 Roman soldiers found at the base of the city wall.

The findings were presented the Archaeological Institute of America's annual meeting.

The study shows that the Persians dug a mine underneath the wall in order to enter the city.

They also ignited bitumen and sulphur crystals to produce dense poisonous gases, suggested Simon James, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester.
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Magnify

Scientists Glean New Insights Into Convection In Planets And Stars


PhysOrg
Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:35 UTC
Behavior
© Unknown
This image illustrates the two ways in which convecting fluid will generally behave; "a" represents rapidly rotating convection, and "b" represents chaotic, non-rotating convection. In the journal Nature, Eric King, Jonathan Aurnou and colleagues report on when a convecting fluid goes from "a" to "b" and on the implications of their surprising findings.
A new study by UCLA planetary scientists and their colleagues in Germany overturns a longstanding scientific tenet and provides new insights into how convection controls much of what we observe in planets and stars.

The research, federally funded by the National Science Foundation, unifies results from an extensive array of previous experiments. It appears in the Jan. 15 edition of the journal Nature.

"The Nature paper allows us new and meaningful predictions for where we should observe different behaviors throughout the universe wherever there are rotating convection systems, and that means planets and stars," said study co-author Jonathan Aurnou, a UCLA associate professor of planetary physics. "This allows us to make predictions for almost any body where we can measure the rotation rate and heat coming out. For me, that's exciting."
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Einstein

Quantum Communication Through Synergy

Miranda Marquit
PhysOrg
Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:30 UTC
When most people think of quantum communication, they think in terms of private communication channels - the ability to send messages without a third-party deciphering them. Indeed, quantum cryptography represents a method of sending information that cannot be eavesdropped upon. Without the proper key for decoding the intercepted message, all an interloper would receive is gibberish. To make quantum cryptography work, Graeme Smith tells PhysOrg.com, "We try to understand the protocols and use specially designed channels to send messages and also to shed light on the general theory of privacy in quantum mechanics."

Conventional wisdom, when applied to quantum communication, seems to say that one must have a private channel in order to communicate privately. Nonprivate channels, the thinking goes, should not be able to send quantum information. It is this very thinking that Smith, along with colleague John Smolin, at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, could be overturning. In theory, and with the help of some mathematical equations, Smith and Smolin show that it might be possible to combine nonprivate channels to create a channel that would transmit quantum information - and communicate privately at greater distances than currently possible. Their reasoning can be found in Physical Review Letters: "Can Nonprivate Channels Transmit Quantum Information?"

"If you had a channel that didn't allow you to communicate privately," Smith points out, "you would think you have a weak resource. But when you start looking at these channels, and you start looking at their limits, you begin to see something else." This "something else," Smith continues, includes qualities that allow nonprivate channels to combine in a way that allows them to possibly become useful for quantum communication.
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Magnify

Parasites in the Genome: A Molecular Parasite Plays an Important Role in Human Evolution


PhysOrg
Mon, 19 Jan 2009 18:25 UTC
Parasite
© Max Planck Institute
A Scheme of the L1ORF1p trimer. B Crystal structure of the RRM-domain of the human L1ORF1p protein.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, determined the structure of a protein (L1ORF1p), which is encoded by a parasitic genetic element and which is responsible for its mobility.

The so-called LINE-1 retrotransposon is a mobile genetic element that can multiply and insert itself into chromosomal DNA at many different locations. This disturbs the genetic code at the site of integration, which can have serious consequences for the organism. On the other hand, this leads to genetic variation, an absolute prerequisite for the evolution of species. The structure of the L1ORF1p protein now allows a much more precise investigation of the mechanism of LINE-1 mobilization. This provides new insight into the relation between retrotransposons and retroviruses and probably also into certain evolutionary processes in humans and animals.

Moreover, the researchers assume that the mechanism of LINE-1 retrotransposition can be exploited one day to precisely insert genetic information into specific locations. This would be an alternative to contemporary, less location-specific methods that are based on a retroviral mechanism. (PNAS, January 20th, 2009)
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Laptop

Fake sites spreading malware claim Obama won't take oath

Gregg Keizer
Network World
Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:28 UTC
Sites claiming President-Elect Barack Obama will refuse to take the oath of office Tuesday are serving up attack code believed to be programmed by the same hackers responsible for the notorious Storm bot Trojan, researchers said this weekend.

According to researchers at several security companies, including F-Secure Corp. , MX Logic Inc. and Trend Micro Inc. , spam campaigns are in gear that try to trick users into visiting malicious Web sites hosting variations of "Waledec," the Trojan horse thought to be the successor to Storm

Sam Masiello, vice president of information security at MX Logic, was one of the first to call attention to the attacks, which begin with one-line spam messages such as "Haven't you heard latest news about our president-elect?", "Barack Obama abandoned sinking ship," and "Obama doesn't wany [sic] anymore to be a president."

The links in those messages lead to a legitimate-looking site that resembles the real Obama-Biden campaign site . The fake site contains both bogus and real news stories. At the top of the page is a story with the headline "Barack Obama has refused to be a president," that includes text which reads, "On the Eve of Inauguration Day President-elect Barack Obama made statement. He declared that he is definitely NOT ready for this position."
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