Science & TechnologyS


Laptop

Amazon will provide CIA with cloud computing

CIA and amazon
The intelligence community is about to get the equivalent of an adrenaline shot to the chest. This summer, a $600 million computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services for the Central Intelligence Agency over the past year will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community. If the technology plays out as officials envision, it will usher in a new era of cooperation and coordination, allowing agencies to share information and services much more easily and avoid the kind of intelligence gaps that preceded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

For the first time, agencies within the IC (intelligence community) will be able to order a variety of on-demand computing and analytic services from the CIA and National Security Agency. What's more, they'll only pay for what they use.

The vision was first outlined in the IC Information Technology Enterprise plan championed by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and IC Chief Information Officer Al Tarasiuk almost three years ago. Cloud computing is one of the core components of the strategy to help the IC discover, access and share critical information in an era of seemingly infinite data.

Sherlock

Researchers develop pesticide biosensor

pesticida pesticides
© REUTERS/Sukree Sukplang
When does too much of something become a bad thing? That's the question Dr. Jonathan Claussen, assistant professor at Iowa State University's Department of Mechanical Engineering, and his team of researchers aim to help farmers answer when it comes to pesticide use.

Claussen and his team created a flexible, low cost and disposable biosensor that can detect pesticides in soil. This biosensor is made of graphene, a strong and stable nanoparticle, and provides instantaneous feedback, as opposed to the time and money it would otherwise take to send a sample to a lab and await results.

The growing interest in biodetection from consumers and the food industry itself has reached a global audience. Detecting genetically modified organisms and pesticides in very low concentrations with smart phones will one day be a reality.

USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) supported the project with an Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) grant as part of the Nanotechnology Program.

The biosensor is made by first printing graphene ink onto paper. A laser then traces over the ink to improve its electrical conductivity by welding together flakes of the graphene ink, making a nanostructured surface that is three dimensional.

Microscope 1

Counter-intuitive prostate cancer treatment shows great promise, doctors still 'figuring out how this works'

medical treatment cancer
© Alexandra Beier / Reuters
An experimental prostate cancer therapy could revolutionize treatment. By "shocking" tumors with large amounts of testosterone and then depriving it of the same hormone, doctors from Johns Hopkins University halted the progression of the disease.

A man with advanced prostate cancer decided to try an unconventional method, and he's probably glad he did. Doctors from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore "shocked" his tumors with large amounts of testosterone, and he has been cancer free since.

The study was led by Professor Sam Denmeade, who told the Telegraph: "We are still in the early stages of figuring out how this works and how to incorporate it into the treatment paradigm for prostate cancer."

However, if the results from the test hold up through future testing, it could completely change how prostate cancer is treated. Traditionally, prostate cancer is treated by depriving the cancer of testosterone, because it was thought that the male hormones stimulate and fuel cancer cells, EurekaAlert! reported.

Brain

Neuroscience as a tool of war

neuroscientists
© Saturday Evening Post/Harris A. EwingA discipline neither good nor evil.
What could once only be imagined in science fiction is now increasingly coming to fruition: Drones can be flown by human brains' thoughts. Pharmaceuticals can help soldiers forget traumatic experiences or produce feelings of trust to encourage confession in interrogation. DARPA-funded research is working on everything from implanting brain chips to "neural dust" in an effort to alleviate the effects of traumatic experience in war. Invisible microwave beams produced by military contractors and tested on U.S. prisoners can produce the sensation of burning at a distance.

What all these techniques and technologies have in common is that they're recent neuroscientific breakthroughs propelled by military research within a broader context of rapid neuroscientific development, driven by massive government-funded projects in both America and the European Union. Even while much about the brain remains mysterious, this research has contributed to the rapid and startling development of neuroscientific technology.

And while we might marvel at these developments, it is also undeniably true that this state of affairs raises significant ethical questions. What is the proper role - if any - of neuroscience in national defense or war efforts? My research addresses these questions in the broader context of looking at how international relations, and specifically warfare, are shaped by scientific and medical expertise and technology.

Battery

5,000 years of battery life: Nuclear waste-formed radioactive diamonds provide long-lasting energy

diamond ring
© Martin Poole / Global Look Press
Scientists have discovered a way to convert nuclear waste into radioactive black diamond batteries which last more than 5,000 years.

Researchers at the University of Bristol have found a means of creating a battery capable of generating clean electricity for five millennia.

Scientists found that by heating graphite blocks - used to house uranium rods in nuclear reactors - much of the radioactive carbon is given off as a gas.

This can then be gathered and turned into radioactive diamonds using a high-temperature chemical reaction, in which carbon atoms are left on the surface in small, dark-colored diamond crystals.

Beaker

Doctors in UK will seek permission to create baby with three people's DNA, replacing mother's faulty mitochondria

defective mitochondria
© Ben Birchall/PAMRT aims to overcome the problem by replacing the mother’s defective mitochondria with those from a healthy donor. Photograph
Specialists poised to offer mitochondrial replacement therapy if government's fertility regulator approves the treatment

Doctors will seek permission this month to create Britain's first baby from the DNA of three people if the government's fertility regulator approves the treatment for carefully chosen patients.

Specialists in Newcastle are ready to offer mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT) to women who are in danger of passing on devastating and often fatal genetic disorders to their children. The conditions affect about one in 10,000 births.

A scientific review commissioned by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) concluded on Wednesday that the therapy should be approved for "cautious clinical use" when children are at risk of inheriting specific genetic diseases.

The HFEA will now consider the findings and invite clinics to apply for licences if it endorses the recommendations at a meeting on 15 December. Last year, parliament changed the law to allow MRT, but scientists continued with further experiments to assess the treatment's safety.

Fireball 2

Fireball alert! Eight NEO asteroids will approach Earth in December

Fireball - stock image
Stock image
There are currently eight known NEO Asteroids discovered that will pass within approximately 10LD or less (LD stands for "Lunar Distance"), in the month of December 2016. I expect that 10-35 NEOs or more, 10LD or less, will be discovered before month end.

Expect some spectacular bolides, fireballs, and meteors this month and especially large ones 3-5 days before and following the passing of the less than 10LD NEOs and fifteen small mountain-sized NEO asteroids, diameters ranging from 400m-2.0km, that will safely pass this month.
NEO chart for December
© NASA/JPL
Be ready for some bolide, fireball, and meteor activity Cameras Ready!

Tornado2

Study confirms tornado outbreaks are increasing - Scientists don't understand why

Laramie tornado
© John Allen/Central Michigan UniversityA tornado near Elk Mountain, west of Laramie Wyoming on the 15th of June, 2015. The tornado passed over mostly rural areas of the county, lasting over 20 minutes.
Tornadoes and severe thunderstorms kill people and damage property every year. Estimated U.S. insured losses due to severe thunderstorms in the first half of 2016 were $8.5 billion. The largest U.S. impacts of tornadoes result from tornado outbreaks, sequences of tornadoes that occur in close succession. Last spring a research team led by Michael Tippett, associate professor of applied physics and applied mathematics at Columbia Engineering, published a study showing that the average number of tornadoes during outbreaks—large-scale weather events that can last one to three days and span huge regions—has risen since 1954. But they were not sure why.

In a new paper, published December 1 in Science via First Release, the researchers looked at increasing trends in the severity of tornado outbreaks where they measured severity by the number of tornadoes per outbreak. They found that these trends are increasing fastest for the most extreme outbreaks. While they saw changes in meteorological quantities that are consistent with these upward trends, the meteorological trends were not the ones expected under climate change.

"This study raises new questions about what climate change will do to severe thunderstorms and what is responsible for recent trends," says Tippett, who is also a member of the Data Science Institute and the Columbia Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate. "The fact that we don't see the presently understood meteorological signature of global warming in changing outbreak statistics leaves two possibilities: either the recent increases are not due to a warming climate, or a warming climate has implications for tornado activity that we don't understand. This is an unexpected finding."

Comment: The climate scientists have not considered the importance of atmospheric dust loading and the winning Electric Universe model in their research. Such information and much more, are explained in the book Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection by Pierre Lescaudron and Laura Knight-Jadczyk.
The accumulation of cometary dust in the Earth's atmosphere plays an important role in the increase of tornadoes, cyclones, hurricanes and their associated rainfalls, snowfalls and lightning. To understand this mechanism we must first take into account the electric nature of hurricanes, tornadoes and cyclones, which are actually manifestations of the same electric phenomenon at different scales or levels of power.
Increasing cometary and volcanic dust loading of the atmosphere (one indicator is the intensification of noctilucent clouds we are witnessing) is accentuating electric charge build-up, whereby we can expect to observe more extreme weather and planetary upheaval as well as awesome light shows and other related mysterious phenomena.


MIB

How it takes just six seconds to hack a credit card

Internet security - lock
Working out the card number, expiry date and security code of any Visa credit or debit card can take as little as six seconds and uses nothing more than guesswork, new research has shown.

Research published in the academic journal IEEE Security & Privacy, shows how the so-called Distributed Guessing Attack is able to circumvent all the security features put in place to protect online payments from fraud.

Exposing the flaws in the VISA payment system, the team from Newcastle University, UK, found neither the network nor the banks were able to detect attackers making multiple, invalid attempts to get payment card data.

Comment: Guessing card data is one thing, and as demonstrated it's clearly possible to do quickly. But figuring out the full name and actual address associated with the card is far more difficult in many, if not most cases, impossible without direct information about a card holder.

This points out why all online merchants should be including address verification into their credit card processing backend systems - and incidentally address verification is a feature offered by nearly all of the most widely used payment gateway providers, however not all banks provide address verification for the cards they issue - in which case a merchant ought to simply deny the use of the card entirely if address verification fails or isn't available from the bank - all in an effort to protect their shoppers even if that denial is an inconvenience to the shoppers.


2 + 2 = 4

Superconducting bismuth is real, and it's forcing us to rethink the nature of superconductivity

Bismuth
© Alchemist-hp/WikimediaBismuth
Bismuth is one of the weirdest-looking elements on the Periodic Table, but its internal properties just got even stranger. Scientists have discovered that at a fraction of a degree above absolute zero (-273.15°C), bismuth becomes a superconductor - a material that can conduct electricity without resistance.

According to the current theory of superconductivity, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because for 40 years now, scientists have assumed that superconducting materials must be abundant in free-flowing mobile electrons. But in bismuth, there's just one mobile electron for every 100,000 atoms.