Day: January 28, 2017

Scientist Investigate A Brand New Form of Matter: Time Crystals

The discovery of “non-equilibrium matter” could re-write the rules of physics. Long-time Slashdot reader jasonbrown quotes ScienceAlert: For months now, there’s been speculation that researchers might have finally created time crystals — strange crystals that have an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, putting them in perpetual motion without energy. Now it’s official — researchers have just reported in detail how to make and measure these bizarre crystals. And two independent teams of scientists claim they’ve actually created time crystals in the lab based off this blueprint, confirming the existence of an entirely new form of matter. Both teams — one at Harvard and the other at the University of Maryland — have submitted their findings to peer-reviewed publications, according to the article, and “the fact that two separate teams have used the same blueprint to make time crystals out of vastly different systems is promising.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientist Investigate A Brand New Form of Matter: Time Crystals

Surgical robot makes highly precise eye injection possible

For the first time ever, a team of eye surgeons were able to inject a thrombolytic drug directly into a patient’s retinal vein to dissolve a blood clot. It was a success despite the fact that the vein is as thin as human hair thanks to a surgical robot developed by researchers from KU Leuven , a university in Belgium. The condition they treated is called retinal vein occlusion, and it leads to reduced eyesight and blindness. At the moment, doctors can only suppress its effects with monthly eye injections, because the retinal vein itself is only around 0.1 millimeter wide. It’s just much too thin for manual injections when the drug has to be administered for 10 minutes straight. Professor Peter Stalmans, an eye surgeon at University Hospitals Leuven, said: “The current treatment for retinal vein occlusion costs society €32.000 per eye. This is a high price tag, considering that you’re only treating the side effects and that there is little more you can do than avoid reducing eyesight. The robotic device finally enables us to treat the cause of the thrombosis in the retina. I look forward to what is next: if we succeed, we will literally be able to make blind people see again.” To address the issue, the researchers created a robot that can help a surgeon insert the needle precisely and then hold it perfectly still. They also designed the 0.03 millimeter needle, which is three times thinner than human hair, needed to inject the drug into the tiny vein. According to the university, the method successfully dissolved the blood clot and the patient is now doing well. However, it’ll take some time before everyone else who has the condition can go through the same treatment: the surgery was merely part of the first phase of the method’s clinical trial. The surgeons have to replicate the procedure’s success on other patients and then study its effects in the trial’s second phase. Source: KU Leuven

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Surgical robot makes highly precise eye injection possible

Majority of Android VPNs can’t be trusted to make users more secure

(credit: Ron Amadeo) Over the past half-decade, a growing number of ordinary people have come to regard virtual private networking software as an essential protection against all-too-easy attacks that intercept sensitive data or inject malicious code into incoming traffic. Now, a comprehensive study of almost 300 VPN apps downloaded by millions of Android users from Google’s official Play Market finds that the vast majority of them can’t be fully trusted. Some of them don’t work at all. According to a research paper that analyzed the source-code and network behavior of 283 VPN apps for Android: 18 percent didn’t encrypt traffic at all, a failure that left users wide open to man-in-the-middle attacks when connected to Wi-Fi hotspots or other types of unsecured networks 16 percent injected code into users’ Web traffic to accomplish a variety of objectives, such as image transcoding, which is often intended to make graphic files load more quickly. Two of the apps injected JavaScript code that delivered ads and tracked user behavior. JavaScript is a powerful programming language that can easily be used maliciously 84 percent leaked traffic based on the next-generation IPv6 internet protocol, and 66 percent don’t stop the spilling of domain name system-related data, again leaving that data vulnerable to monitoring or manipulation Of the 67 percent of VPN products that specifically listed enhanced privacy as a benefit, 75 percent of them used third-party tracking libraries to monitor users’ online activities. 82 percent required user permissions to sensitive resources such as user accounts and text messages 38 percent contained code that was classified as malicious by VirusTotal , a Google-owned service that aggregates the scanning capabilities of more than 100 antivirus tools Four of the apps installed digital certificates that caused the apps to intercept and decrypt transport layer security traffic sent between the phones and encrypted websites Apps that intercepted and decrypted TLS traffic. The researchers—from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, the University of South Wales, and the University of California at Berkeley—wrote in their report: Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Majority of Android VPNs can’t be trusted to make users more secure

Flying Cretaceous Monster Ate Dinosaurs For Breakfast

It’s been said that the pterosaur, which can only be described as a bird-reptile-dinosaur- esque -thing, was the largest flying animal. This giant beast—which roamed the Earth during the Cretaceous period roughly 66.5 million years ago—was a reptile but not actually a dinosaur. Despite being winged, it wasn’t bird, … Read more…

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Flying Cretaceous Monster Ate Dinosaurs For Breakfast