Tag: australia

Rescue Drone Saves Two Boys from Drowning on Its First Day in Service

Imagine being in the ocean, trapped in a swell some 700 meters from shore. Suddenly a yellow package drops out of the sky as if sent by a god, hits the water next to you and expands into a flotation device. That was the experience of two unlucky, then lucky teenage boys off the coast of Lennox Head in Australia last week. Someone spotted the boys in distress and called it in, but the nearest lifeguard station was a kilometer away. Just that morning, however, Lennox Head had brought their new lifesaving drone into service. In a little over a minute, a lifeguard supervisor had launched the drone, spotted the boys, flew it over to them, and remotely dropped the flotation device. The boys were able to grab it and swim to shore. Here’s the footage: The drone is manufactured by a company called Little Ripper Lifesaver , founded by Kevin Weldon after he witnessed a drone canvassing the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and realized its lifesaving potential. The Marine Pod dropped over Lennox Head contained a water-triggered flotation device, which is repackable and reusable. The company is now testing a saltwater-activated electromagnetic shark repellent device, with plans to include that in future kits. Little Ripper also makes a Land Pod, which contains an automatic defibrillator, a location beacon, a thermal blanket, a radio, a highly-visible rescue banner and a first aid kit. Lastly they make a Snow Pod, which adds skin warmers and energy bars to the Land Pod. Lennox Head received the drone as part of a trial set up by an organization called Surf Life Saving NSW and the New South Wales Government. According to ABC News , Surf Life Saving NSW project manager for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), Kelvin Morton, said the project was a world-first. “These UAVs that we’re using to drop these inflatable pods is innovative, and we know that most or all of the lifesaving organisations around the world are stepping back and waiting to see how this goes.” Mr Morton said the drones gave surf lifesavers a new advantage. “It gives them eyes across the water at a height of 60 metres and they can move at 50 kilometres an hour, ” he said.  “They’ve never had that ability before. They can see things in the water that a jet-ski simply cannot.”

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Rescue Drone Saves Two Boys from Drowning on Its First Day in Service

Australian Birds of Prey Are Deliberately Setting Forests On Fire

An anonymous reader writes: If you’ve been counting the ways the Australian environment is trying to kill you, you can now add “arson” to the list. According to a six-year study published in The Journal of Ethnobiology, observers have confirmed what Aboriginal rangers have been observing for years: birds of prey routinely carry burning or smouldering sticks into dry grassy areas to scare small mammals into fleeing so they can be pack-hunted more effectively. This has implications for environmental management, since the best firebreak will not protect your controlled burn from a “firehawk” determined to breach it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Australian Birds of Prey Are Deliberately Setting Forests On Fire

8.5-Ton Chinese Space Station Will Crash To Earth In a Few Months

dryriver writes: China launched a space laboratory named Tiangong 1 into orbit in 2011. The space laboratory was supposed to become a symbol of China’s ambitious bid to become a space superpower. After two years in space, Tiangong 1 started experiencing technical failure. Last year Chinese officials confirmed that the space laboratory had to be scrapped. The 8.5 ton heavy space laboratory has begun its descent towards Earth and is expected to crash back to Earth within the next few months. Most of the laboratory is expected to burn up in earth’s atmosphere, but experts believe that pieces as heavy as 100 kilograms (220 pounds) may survive re-entry and impact earth’s surface. Nobody will be able to predict with any precision where those chunks of space laboratory will land on Earth until a few hours before re-entry occurs. The chance that anyone would be harmed by Tiangong-1’s debris is considered unlikely. When NASA’s SkyLab fell to earth in 1979, an Australian town fined them $400 — for littering. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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8.5-Ton Chinese Space Station Will Crash To Earth In a Few Months

Australian defense firm was hacked and F-35 data stolen, DOD confirms

Enlarge (credit: Royal Australian Air Force) The Australian Cyber Security Centre noted in its just-issued 2017 Threat Report that a small Australian defense company “with contracting links to national security projects” had been the victim of a cyber-espionage attack detected last November. “ACSC analysis confirmed that the adversary had sustained access to the network for an extended period of time and had stolen a significant amount of data,” the ACSC report stated. “The adversary remained active on the network at the time.” More details of the breach were revealed on Wednesday at an IT conference in Sydney. ASD Incident Response Manager Mitchell Clarke said, “The compromise was extensive and extreme.” The attacker behind the breach has been internally referred to at the Australian Signals Directorate as ” APT Alf ” (named for a character in Australia’s long-running television show Home and Away , not the US television furry alien). Alf stole approximately 30 gigabytes of data, including data related to Australia’s involvement in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, as well as data on the P-8 Poseidon patrol plane, planned future Australian Navy ships, the C-130 Hercules cargo plane, and the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bomb. The breach began in July of 2016. A spokesperson for the US Department of Defense’s F-35 Joint Program Office confirmed the breach to Defense News , stating that the Office “is aware” of the breach. The spokesperson reiterated that no classified data was exposed. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Australian defense firm was hacked and F-35 data stolen, DOD confirms

Microsoft Yanks Three Bad Patches Of Their Last Outlook Patch

An anonymous reader quotes ComputerWorld’s Woody Leonhard: I just received word from Gunter Born that Microsoft has pulled three of its Outlook patches… There’s no specific recommendation that you uninstall the yanked patches — indeed, there’s no description of the problems caused by the latest round — but earlier versions of the bad patches-of-patches had a nasty habit of crashing Outlook… Microsoft still hasn’t fixed any of the Office 2007 bugs it introduced in the June security patches. If you’re keeping score at home, the yanked patches are: KB 4011042 – July 5, 2017, update for Outlook 2010 KB 3191849 – June 27, 2017, update for Outlook 2013 KB 3213654 – June 30, 2017, update for Outlook 2016 Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Yanks Three Bad Patches Of Their Last Outlook Patch

How Australia Bungled Its $36 Billion High-Speed Internet Rollout

Not very pleased with your internet speeds? Think about the people Down Under. Australia’s “bungled” National Broadband Network (NBN) has been used as a “cautionary tale” for other countries to take note of. Despite the massive amount of money being pumped into the NBN, the New York Times reports, the internet speeds still lagged behind the US, most of western Europe, Japan and South Korea — even Kenya. The article highlights that Australia was the first country where a national plan to cover every house or business was considered and this ambitious plan was hampered by changes in government and a slow rollout (Editor’s note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source), partly because of negotiations with Telstra about the fibre installation. From the report: Australia, a wealthy nation with a widely envied quality of life, lags in one essential area of modern life: its internet speed. Eight years after the country began an unprecedented broadband modernization effort that will cost at least 49 billion Australian dollars, or $36 billion, its average internet speed lags that of the United States, most of Western Europe, Japan and South Korea. In the most recent ranking of internet speeds by Akamai, a networking company, Australia came in at an embarrassing No. 51, trailing developing economies like Thailand and Kenya. For many here, slow broadband connections are a source of frustration and an inspiration for gallows humor. One parody video ponders what would happen if an American with a passion for Instagram and streaming “Scandal” were to switch places with an Australian resigned to taking bathroom breaks as her shows buffer. The article shares this anecdote: “Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world have downloaded Hand of Fate, an action video game made by a studio in Brisbane, Defiant Development. But when Defiant worked with an audio designer in Melbourne, more than 1, 000 miles away, Mr. Jaffit knew it would be quicker to send a hard drive by road than to upload the files, which could take several days.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How Australia Bungled Its $36 Billion High-Speed Internet Rollout

UK’s Newest Tokamak Fusion Reactor Has Created Its First Plasma

After being switched on for the first time last Friday, the UK’s newest fusion reactor has successfully generated a molten mass of electrically-charged gas, or plasma, inside its core. Futurism reports: Called the ST40, the reactor was constructed by Tokamak Energy, one of the leading private fusion energy companies in the world. The company was founded in 2009 with the express purpose of designing and developing small fusion reactors to introduce fusion power into the grid by 2030. Now that the ST40 is running, the company will commission and install the complete set of magnetic coils needed to reach fusion temperatures. The ST40 should be creating a plasma temperature as hot as the center of the Sun — 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit) — by Autumn 2017. By 2018, the ST40 will produce plasma temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit), another record-breaker for a privately owned and funded fusion reactor. That temperature threshold is important, as it is the minimum temperature for inducing the controlled fusion reaction. Assuming the ST40 succeeds, it will prove that its novel design can produce commercially viable fusion power. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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UK’s Newest Tokamak Fusion Reactor Has Created Its First Plasma

Public Crowd-sourcing Finds New Exoplanets

brindafella writes: A participant in a TV program “Stargazing Live” on Australia’s ABC TV channel has found four planets closely orbiting a star, using an online database. Astrophysicist Dr Chris Lintott, the principal investigator of Zooniverse, reported on Thursday’s show that four “Super Earth” planets had been identified in the data. They orbit closer to their star than Mercury does to our Sun. The person responsible for the find, Andrew Grey, is a mechanic by day and amateur astronomer in his spare time, and lives in the city of Darwin, Northern Territory. The data is sourced from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. “Stargazing Live” host Professor Brian Cox said he could not be more excited about the discovery. “In the seven years I’ve been making Stargazing Live this is the most significant scientific discovery we’ve ever made. The results are astonishing.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Public Crowd-sourcing Finds New Exoplanets

Researchers Discover A Surprising New Role for Lungs: Making Blood

schwit1 quotes ScienceAlert: In experiments involving mice, the team found that lungs produce more than 10 million platelets (tiny blood cells) per hour, equating to the majority of platelets in the animals’ circulation. This goes against the decades-long assumption that bone marrow produces all of our blood components. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco also discovered a previously unknown pool of blood stem cells that makes this happen inside the lung tissue — cells that were incorrectly assumed to mainly reside in bone marrow. “This finding definitely suggests a more sophisticated view of the lungs — that they’re not just for respiration, but also a key partner in formation of crucial aspects of the blood, ” says one of the researchers, Mark R. Looney. The platelet-producing cells actually migrate from the bone marrow to the lungs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researchers Discover A Surprising New Role for Lungs: Making Blood