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Fri, 15 Oct 2021
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'Nothing to hide': Kaspersky Lab offers source code for independent review


RT
Mon, 23 Oct 2017 19:28 UTC
Laptop
© Oliver Berg / Global Look Press
Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab has unveiled to independent experts an unprecedented Global Transparency Initiative that will open its code. The audit is a bid to stave off US accusations the company is working for Russian security services.

A five-point plan revealed by the Kaspersky on Monday has promised access not only to its software, but its company practices and oversight of its data handling. Additionally, the company says it will pay out awards of up to $100,000 for those able to identify vulnerabilities, and establish three "transparency centers" by 2020 "to address any security issues together with customers, trusted partners and government stakeholders."

"We need to reestablish trust in relationships between companies, governments and citizens. That's why we're launching this Global Transparency Initiative: we want to show how we're completely open and transparent," said company CEO Eugene Kaspersky in a statement.

"We've nothing to hide. And I believe that with these actions we'll be able to overcome mistrust and support our commitment to protecting people in any country on our planet."
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Satellite

Point Nemo: Earth's most remote location is a dead space-craft dumping zone

Dave Mosher
Business Insider
Sun, 22 Oct 2017 17:26 UTC
Point Nemo dumping zone
© Google Earth
Many nations de-orbit old spacecraft over the most remote place on Earth, called Point Nemo.
This "spacecraft cemetery" is about 1,450 miles away from any piece of land and home to hundreds of dead satellites.
The most remote location on Earth has many names: It's called Point Nemo (Latin for "no one") and the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. Most precisely, its exact coordinates are 48 degrees 52.6 minutes south latitude and 123 degrees 23.6 minutes west longitude.

The spot is about 1,450 nautical miles from any spot of land - and the perfect place to dump dead or dying spacecraft, which is why its home to what NASA calls its "spacecraft cemetery."

"It's in the Pacific Ocean and is pretty much the farthest place from any human civilization you can find," NASA said.

Bill Ailor, an aerospace engineer and atmospheric reentry specialist, put it another way: "It's a great place you can put things down without hitting anything," he said.
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Mars

Martian rotating 'magnetotail' may be contributing to the destruction of its atmosphere


RT
Sun, 22 Oct 2017 10:10 UTC
Mars magnetic tail
© Anil Rao / NASA
Plasma explosions from the sun over billions of years have all but stripped Mars of its atmosphere. But a new discovery by NASA shows that remnants of the Red Planet's magnetic field can be found in the form of a rotating 'tail'.

Invisible to the naked eye, the so-called 'magnetotail' was recently detected by NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission spacecraft (MAVEN).

MAVEN was launched in 2013 to trace the Martian world's climate history and determine if it may have once sustained life.
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Syringe

Hunger-blocking injection lets obese monkeys quickly lose weight

Alice Klein
New Scientist
Wed, 18 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC
Hunger blocking injection
© Erik Jonsson/EyeEm/Getty
Need some help with your hunger?
A protein injection that decreases appetite helps obese monkeys to slim down fast and cuts their risk of diabetes.

Excitement is growing about a protein called GDF15, which naturally regulates body weight in humans and animals. When extra amounts are injected into mice, they eat less, lose weight and have fewer signs of diabetes.

Several research teams have tried developing GDF15 as an obesity treatment, but it breaks down too quickly in the bloodstream to work.

Now a team led by Murielle Véniant at pharmaceutical company Amgen has found a way to make GDF15 last longer in the body.
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Question

Does science need more mavericks?

Adrian Currie
Aeon
Mon, 16 Oct 2017 16:04 UTC
Tesla and high voltage generator
© Wellcome Images, Wikimedia
At the end of his life, the English naturalist Charles Darwin became intrigued by the musicality of worms. In the last book he ever wrote, in 1881, he describes a series of experiments on his vermicular subjects. Worms, Darwin discovered, are sensitive to vibrations when transmitted through a solid surface, but tone-deaf and unresponsive to the shriek of a whistle or the bellow of a bassoon.

Earlier, in the 1760s, the French natural philosopher Comte de Buffon heated up balls of iron and other minerals until they were white-hot. Then, by sense of touch alone, he recorded how long it took them to cool to room temperature.

A hundred years before that, Isaac Newton wrote about the time he slid a bodkin - a kind of thick tailor's needle - between his skull and his eye, and rubbed the needle so as to distort the shape of his own eyeball.
Newton experiment
© Cambridge University Library
‘An Experiment to Put Pressure on the Eye’, from Isaac Newton’s notebooks (1665-6).
These experiments are all pretty wacky, but they still bear the mark of the scientific. Each one involves the careful recording and assessment of data. Darwin was excluding the hypothesis that hearing explained earthworm behaviour; Buffon extrapolated the age of the Earth from a wide range of geological materials (his estimate: 75,000 years); and Newton's unpleasant self-surgery helped to develop his theory of optics, by clarifying the relationship between the eye's geometry and the resulting visual effects. Their methods might have been unorthodox, but they were following their intellectual instincts about what the enquiry demanded. They had licence to be scientific mavericks.
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Map

Scientists are mapping an Atlas of the underworld hidden far beneath our feet

David Nield
Science Alert
Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00 UTC
Atlas of the Underworld 0
© Utrecht University
For as long as humans have been around we've been fascinated by the world hiding underneath the surface of the Earth, and now scientists are systematically mapping the positions of the tectonic plates that have been pushed deeper into the planet's core.

It's called the Atlas of the Underworld and you can view it online - measurements go down up to 2,900 kilometres (1,800 miles) in some cases. The focus is on 'dead' tectonic plates, pushed down to the bottom of the Earth's mantle and no longer part of the surface.
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Boat

Russian company floats brand new hydrofoil passenger ship after two-decade pause


RT
Sun, 22 Oct 2017 12:55 UTC
Kometa 120M
© Oleg Smyslov / Sputnik
A new hydrofoil ship meant to transport up to 120 passengers along sea coast routes has been floated by a Russian producer. The design was popular in the Soviet Union, but modern Russia has not built such vessels for almost two decades.

Hydrofoil works similarly to a regular aerofoil, creating lift for a moving craft. A speeding hydrofoil ship rises above the water with only the foils staying under it, greatly reducing drag and allowing greater speeds to be reached. A French hydrofoil trimaran called "Hydroptère" set the world sailing speed record in 2009 and remains the fastest vessel in the world, with a sail of over 400 square feet.

Among the drawbacks of the design are complexity, poorer fuel efficiency compared with conventional boats and some risks when operating in littered waters or during harsh weather conditions. Still, the boats have found their use as military patrol boats, ferry vessels, leisure craft and even in water sports.
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Wine

In the midst of global chaos and attack, Russia's science community flourishes

Becky Ferreira
Motherboard
Tue, 30 May 2017 12:00 UTC
Putin and winners of a prize for young scientists.
© Dmitry Azarov/Kommersant via Getty Images
Putin and winners of a prize for young scientists.

Comment: Though this article provides a nice survey of Russia's contemporary and historical achievements in the field of science, it puts a lot of it in the context of Russia's societal and geopolitical growth in quite often a Western-narrative-biased way. All the same, there's a good amount about Russia's accomplishments and aspirations that is acknowledged here...


I took a five-day tour of Russia's leading scientific research centers. This is what I saw.

They call them the "golden brains." Perched 22 storeys high, they engulf the top floors of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) headquarters in southwest Moscow. Somehow both geometric and wildly rampageous, the copper and aluminum sculptures look like the kind of long-lost technologies that protagonists stumble across on deserted alien worlds in Mass Effect.

On a crisp evening in late February, we stepped out of a van and walked across a plaza, lined by ornate statues and a giant metal clock. Shepherded by Asya Shepunova, a lively public relations representative for the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), a university based in the northern suburb of Dolgoprudny, we made our way past a security checkpoint to a welcome dinner at a restaurant enclosed within the golden brains.

In tandem with the press team at ITMO University in Saint Petersburg, Shepunova and her colleagues organized this five-day tour of Russia's two largest and most scientifically active cities. A handful of science journalists from around the world, including me - hi, I'm Becky-RSVP'd yes. A little over a month after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, we arrived in Moscow.
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Attention

Beekeepers warn 'Bee Mageddon' as France authorizes sulfaoxaflor

Henry Samuel
The Telegraph
Fri, 20 Oct 2017 04:20 UTC
bee cornflower
© Michael Probst
French bee keepers are up in arms over the authorisation of an insecticide they warn could sound the death knell of their already decimated bee population.

Bee hives have been hit in Europe, North America and elsewhere by a mysterious phenomenon called "colony collapse disorder". The blight has been blamed on mites, a virus or fungus, pesticides, or a combination of factors.

With the honey harvest in France down to just 10,000 tons this year - three times less than in the 1990s - the country's national apiculture union, UNAF, slammed what it called the "scandalous" authorisation of sulfaoxaflor, which attacks the central nervous system of insects. According to UNAF, sulfaoxaflor acts like a neonicotinoid, a pesticide based on the chemical structure of nicotine that many blame for being at least partially responsible for plummeting bee populations.
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Music

Interspecies communication: Beluga rooming with dolphins learns their language

Elizabeth Preston
Discovery
Sat, 21 Oct 2017 19:34 UTC
dolphins
© Shutterstock/Andrii Zhezhera
In November 2013, a four-year-old captive beluga whale moved to a new home. She had been living in a facility with other belugas. But in her new pool, the Koktebel dolphinarium in Crimea, her only companions were dolphins. The whale adapted quickly: she started imitating the unique whistles of the dolphins, and stopped making a signature beluga call altogether.

"The first appearance of the beluga in the dolphinarium caused a fright in the dolphins," write Elena Panova and Alexandr Agafonov of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The bottlenose dolphins included one adult male, two adult females and a young female. But the animals soon got along, er, swimmingly. In August 2016, one of the adult female dolphins gave birth to a calf that regularly swam alongside the beluga.
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