Science & TechnologyS


Network

Carnegie Mellon system thwarts Internet eavesdropping


Carnegie Mellon University
Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:50 UTC
The growth of shared Wi-Fi and other wireless computer networks has increased the risk of eavesdropping on Internet communications, but researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and College of Engineering have devised a low-cost system that can thwart these "Man-in-the-Middle" (MitM) attacks.

The system, called Perspectives, also can protect against attacks related to a recently disclosed software flaw in the Domain Name System (DNS), the Internet phone book used to route messages between computers.

The researchers - David Andersen, assistant professor of computer science, Adrian Perrig, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and public policy, and Dan Wendlandt, a Ph.D. student in computer science - have incorporated Perspectives into an extension for the popular Mozilla Firefox v3 browser than can be downloaded free of charge here.
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Nuke

Do nuclear decay rates depend on our distance from the sun?


The physics arXiv blog
Sat, 30 Aug 2008 08:37 UTC
Here's an interesting conundrum involving nuclear decay rates.

We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields).

So that makes it hard to explain the curious periodic variations in the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226 observed by groups at the Brookhaven National Labs in the US and at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesandstalt in Germany in the 1980s.
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Bulb

Scientists unmask brain's hidden potential


Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:50 UTC
New findings explain how the brain compensates for vision loss; suggests much more versatility than previously recognized.

Previous research has found that when vision is lost, a person's senses of touch and hearing become enhanced. But exactly how this happens has been unclear.

Now a long-term study from the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) demonstrates that sudden and complete loss of vision leads to profound - but rapidly reversible -- changes in the visual cortex. These findings, reported in the August 27 issue of the journal PLOS One, not only provide new insights into how the brain compensates for the loss of sight, but also suggest that the brain is more adaptable than originally thought.

"The brain's ability to reorganize itself is much greater than previously believed," explains senior author Alvaro Pascual-Leone, MD, PhD, Director of the Berenson-Allen Center and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). "In our studies [in which a group of sighted study subjects were blindfolded for five days], we have shown that even in an adult, the normally developed visual system quickly becomes engaged to process touch in response to complete loss of sight. The speed and dynamic nature of the changes we observed suggest that rather than establishing new nerve connections - which would take a long time - the visual cortex is unveiling abilities that are normally concealed when sight is intact."
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Info

'Pristine' Amazonian Region Hosted Large, Urban Civilization


Science Daily
Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:34 UTC
They aren't the lost cities early explorers sought fruitlessly to discover.

But ancient settlements in the Amazon, now almost entirely obscured by tropical forest, were once large and complex enough to be considered "urban" as the term is commonly applied to both medieval European and ancient Greek communities.

Image
©University of Florida
Picture from a low-flying airplane as it passes over the current Kuikuro village, demonstrating the circular-plaza village structure that has historically been and remains a primary cultural trait of urban construction.

So says a paper set to appear August 28 in Science co-authored by anthropologists from the University of Florida and Brazil, and a member of the Kuikuro, an indigenous Amazonian people who are the descendants of the settlements' original inhabitants.

"If we look at your average medieval town or your average Greek polis, most are about the scale of those we find in this part of the Amazon," said Mike Heckenberger, a UF professor of anthropology and the lead author of the paper. "Only the ones we find are much more complicated in terms of their planning."
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Robot

A 'Frankenrobot' with a biological brain


AFP
Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:27 UTC
Meet Gordon, probably the world's first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue.

Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon's primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday.

Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers told AFP.
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Telescope

Origin Of High Energy Emission From Crab Nebula Identified


Science Daily
Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:31 UTC


Crab Nebula
© NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU); Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (Skyfactory)
The Crab Nebula from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Another piece of the jigsaw in understanding how neutron stars work has been put in place following the discovery by scientists of the origin of the high energy emission from rotation-powered pulsars.

Pulsar systems containing neutron stars accelerate particles to immense energies, typically one hundred times more than the most powerful accelerators on Earth. Scientists are still uncertain exactly how these systems work and where the particles are accelerated.

Now a team of researchers from the UK and Italy, led by Professor Tony Dean of the University of Southampton, has detected polarized gamma-ray emission from the vicinity of the Crab Nebula - one of the most dramatic sights in deep space. By using spectroscopic imaging and measuring the polarization - or the alignment - of the waves of high energy radiation in the gamma-ray band, they have shown that these energetic photons originate close to the pulsar.
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Video

Stone Age comet destroys North America: Clovis Comet at Pecos Archeological Conference


YouTube
Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:34 UTC
Allen West's presentation August 8, 2008 to the Pecos Archeological Conference at the University of Northern Arizona's Cline Library Auditorium

Part 1:
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Display

Eyes turn to dawn of 'visual computing'


Agence France-Presse
Thu, 28 Aug 2008 05:28 UTC
Lifelike graphics are breaking free of elite computer games and spreading throughout society in what industry insiders proclaim is the dawning of a "visual computing era."

Astronauts, film makers and celebrities joined software savants, engineers and gamers in the heart of Silicon Valley this week for a first-ever NVision conference devoted to computer imagery advances changing the way people and machines interact.

"Visual computing is transforming the videogame industry; transforming the film industry, and has all kinds of potential for how we view real-time television," NVIDIA co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang told those gathered at the event.

"We solve some of the most challenging problems for more and more companies around the world. Let the era of visual computing begin."
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Monkey Wrench

UMass startup DigitRobotics' uBot builds other robots

Brendan Lynch
MHT \ The Journal of New England Technology
Fri, 29 Aug 2008 03:40 UTC
DigitRobotics LLC, founded by a pair of University of Massachusetts Amherst Ph.D. students, wants to do some of robotics researchers' work for them.

The company plans to sell its uBot to people who make robots, according to its co-founders, Bryan Thibodeau and Patrick Deegan.
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Magic Wand

Immaterial display allows viewers to handle 3D images in air

Lisa Zyga
PhysOrg
Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:47 UTC
In the future of immersive entertainment, people may not only walk through floating 3D images, but also manipulate the images in thin air. Taking a step toward this reality, researchers have built a prototype of a room-sized 3D immaterial display, demonstrating the possibility of using the technology for a variety of entertainment purposes.

3D teapot
©Cha Lee, et al. ©2008 IEEE.
Image of a 3D teapot, displayed using two perpendicular FogScreens.

Computer scientists Cha Lee, Stephen DiVerdi, and Tobias Höllerer from the University of California Santa Barbara have designed their depth-fused 3D (DFD) display, which uses up to two FogScreens and projectors, along with a user-tracking system, to achieve a 3D effect. The results of their experiments will be published in an upcoming issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
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