Science & TechnologyS


Evil Rays

Still think you have privacy at home? MIT researchers found a way to use WiFi signals to see behind walls

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com
Thu, 29 Oct 2015 21:20 UTC
world surveillance
The implications for privacy under a big brother police state are obvious.

Researchers at MIT have come up with a way to use WiFi signals to see behind walls, and map a room in 3-D. By reflecting the signal, it can also locate the movements of people or objects in the room. The Daily Mail reports:
Using a wireless transmitter fitted behind a wall, computer scientists have developed a device that can map a nearby room in 3D while scanning for human bodies.

Using the signals that bounce and reflect off these people, the device creates an accurate silhouette and can even use this silhouette to identify who that person is.

The device is called RF Capture and it was developed by researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

The RF Capture device transmits wireless signals that travel through a wall and reflect off a person's body back to the device.

[...]

Since only a small number of body parts reflect the signal back at any given point in time, the device monitors how these reflections vary as someone moves and walks.

Comment: A good farmer knows what his livestock is up to at all times. Constant connectivity and smart technology is not benevolently bestowed upon us to make life more convenient. We're being corralled.

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Fish

World's most mysterious whale observed for first time


RT
Fri, 30 Oct 2015 16:38 UTC
Omura's whale
© rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org Omura's whale
The elusive Omura's whale has been documented for the first time ever by an international group of scientists, over a decade after the mysterious mammal was described as a new species.

Previously, no living Omura's whales had been observed in the wild, according to the study published in the Royal Society Open Space journal.

Researchers confirmed that they are tracing the first-detected living population of Omura's whales.


Salvatore Cerchio, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, along with his colleagues, started their observations eight years ago, and until 2011, their search was in vain.
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Green Light

Robo bus: Driverless buses are coming to America

Charlie Sorrel
Fast Company
Thu, 29 Oct 2015 16:09 UTC
robot bus
© n/a
First, a quiet business park. Next, the world.

Self-driving buses are coming to America. The Bishop Ranch business park in San Ramon, California will be the first place in the U.S. to use French robo-buses to ferry passengers around.

Perhaps the best place for autonomous vehicles to start out is in this kind of training ground, although given the safety record of Google's self-driving cars, the training might be for us humans in getting used to them. It's hard to argue that preset routes and low speeds aren't ideal for an introduction to driverless vehicles, and that's just what the Easymile company specializes in.
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Telescope

Halloween is an astronomical holiday derived from the ancient Celtic cross-quarter day

Bruce McClure
EarthSky
Fri, 30 Oct 2015 00:00 UTC
cross-quarter days
© NASAEquinoxes, solstices and cross-quarter days are all hallmarks of Earth’s orbit around the sun. Halloween is the fourth cross-quarter day of the year.
Halloween - short for All Hallows' Eve - is an astronomical holiday. Sure, it's the modern-day descendant from Samhain, a sacred festival of the ancient Celts and Druids in the British Isles. But it's also a cross-quarter day, which is probably why Samhain occurred when it did. Early people were keen observers of the sky. A cross-quarter day is a day more or less midway between an equinox (when the sun sets due west) and a solstice (when the sun sets at its most northern or southern point on the horizon). Halloween - October 31 - is approximately midway point between the autumn equinox and winter solstice, for us in the Northern Hemisphere.

In other words, in traditional astronomy, there are eight major seasonal subdivisions of every year. They include the March and September equinoxes, the June and December solstices, and the intervening four cross-quarter days.

In modern times, the four cross-quarter days are often called Groundhog Day (February 2), May Day (May 1), Lammas (August 1) and Halloween (October 31).
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Bizarro Earth

Ozone layer hole now size of Russia & Canada combined, largest known to date


RT
Fri, 30 Oct 2015 15:19 UTC
Ozone hole
© NASA / Reuters
The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica has reached record-breaking levels, and currently covers an area four times the size of Australia, UN scientists have said.

In addition to the global threat to humanity, it poses another, quite real risk to Australia: extra UV radiation and sunburn on the continent where over 45,000 people are expected to die from skin cancer in 2015.

This year, the hole reached 28.2 million square kilometers: four times the size of Australia or the size of Russia and Canada combined.
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Eye 1

'X-Ray vision': Wifi networks can now identify who you are through walls

Jamie Condliffe
Gizmondo
Wed, 28 Oct 2015 21:29 UTC
wifi through walls
© MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intellegence Laboratory
Who needs a peep hole when a wifi network will do? Researchers from MIT have developed technology that uses wireless signals to see your silhouette through a wall—and it can even tell you apart from other people, too.

The team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab are no strangers to using wireless signals to see what's happening on the other side of a wall. In 2013, they showed off software that could use variations in wifi signal to detect the presence of human motion from the other side of a wall. But in the last two years they've been busy developing the technique, and now they've unveiled the obvious — if slightly alarming — natural progression: they can use the wireless reflections bouncing off a human body to see the silhouette of a person standing behind a wall.

Not only that, the team's technique, known is RF-Capture, is accurate enough to track the hand of a human and, with some repeated measurements, the system can even be trained to recognise different people based just on their wifi silhouette. The research, which is to be presented at SIGGRAPH Asia next month, was published this morning on the research group's website.
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Sun

Research suggests that powerful solar storms may be more common than previously thought


RT
Thu, 29 Oct 2015 21:21 UTC
solar flare
© HO/AFP/Getty ImagesThis 19 August, 2004 NASA Solar and Heliospheric Administration (SOHO) image shows a solar flare(R) erupting from giant sunspot 649. The powerful explosion hurled a coronal mass ejection(CME) into space, but it was directed toward Earth.
Powerful solar storms may be more common than previously thought, according to a study that found two massive storms hit Earth 219 years apart. They were several times stronger than previously recorded ones. Such storms could wreak havoc on technology.

After studying ancient ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, researchers at Lund University in Sweden found that the two solar storms hit Earth more than 1,000 years ago - the "red crucifix" storm in AD 774/775 and another in AD 993/994.

The study follows the work of researchers in 2012, when they found traces of a rapid increase of radioactive carbon in tree rings from those time periods. The 774/775 event corresponded with a text in an ancient Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which referred to a "red crucifix" appearing in the heavens after a sunset.

Comment: A Perfect Solar Superstorm: The 1859 Carrington Event

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Solar Flares

S1 solar storm warning issued

Christopher B Buchanan
USA Today
Thu, 29 Oct 2015 20:31 UTC
solar flare
© HO/AFP/Getty ImagesThis 19 August, 2004 NASA Solar and Heliospheric Administration (SOHO) image shows a solar flare(R) erupting from giant sunspot 649. The powerful explosion hurled a coronal mass ejection(CME) into space, but it was directed toward Earth.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a minor solar radiation storm warning on Thursday morning following readings from a weather satellite in orbit around the Earth.

The warning is expected to last from 12:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. EST, Thursday afternoon.

Officials said that the warning is the result of a coronal mass ejection from the sun that happened around 10:19 p.m. EST on Wednesday as noted by radio signatures.
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Fireball 2

Hallowe'en sky show on tap? Taurids meteor shower strengthens this weekend

David Dickinson
Universe Today
Thu, 29 Oct 2015 17:49 UTC
2015 Taurid meteor stream
© StellariumThe motion of the radiant of the Northern Taurid meteors from mid-October through mid-November. The shower typically peaks around November 12th annually.
Asteroid 2015 TB145 isn't the only cosmic visitor paying our planet a trick-or-treat visit over the coming week. With any luck, the Northern Taurid meteor shower may put on a fine once a decade show heading into early November.

About once a decade, the Northern Taurid meteor stream puts on a good showing. Along with its related shower the Southern Taurids, both are active though late October into early November.

Specifics for 2015

This year sees the Moon reaching Full on Tuesday October 27th, just a few days before Halloween. The Taurid fireballs, however, have a few things going for them that most other showers don't. First is implied in the name: the Northern Taurids, though typically exhibiting a low zenithal hourly rate of around 5 to 10, are, well, fireballs, and thus the light-polluting Moon won't pose much of a problem. Secondly, the Taurid meteor stream is approaching the Earth almost directly from behind, meaning that unlike a majority of meteor showers, the Taurids are just as strong in the early evening as the post midnight early morning hours. As a matter of fact, we saw a brilliant Taurid just last night from light-polluted West Palm Beach in Florida, just opposite to the Full Moon and a partially cloudy sky.
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Solar Flares

Strong magnetic fields found in the inner cores of stars


Phys.org
Thu, 22 Oct 2015 01:07 UTC
magnetic star
This artist's representation of a red giant star with a strong internal magnetic field shows sound waves propagating in the stellar outer layers, while gravity waves propagate in the inner layers where a magnetic field is present.

Astronomers have for the first time probed the magnetic fields in the mysterious inner regions of stars, finding they are strongly magnetized.

Using a technique called asteroseismology, the scientists were able to calculate the magnetic field strengths in the fusion-powered hearts of dozens of red giants, stars that are evolved versions of our sun.

"In the same way medical ultrasound uses sound waves to image the interior of the human body, asteroseismology uses sound waves generated by turbulence on the surface of stars to probe their inner properties," says Caltech postdoctoral researcher Jim Fuller, who co-led a new study detailing the research.

The findings, published in the October 23 issue of Science, will help astronomers better understand the life and death of stars. Magnetic fields likely determine the interior rotation rates of stars; such rates have dramatic effects on how the stars evolve.
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