Tag: findings

Cryptojacking craze that drains your CPU now done by 2,500 sites

Enlarge / A music streaming site that participated in Coinhive crypto mining maxes out the visitor’s CPU. (credit: Malwarebytes ) A researcher has documented almost 2,500 sites that are actively running cryptocurrency mining code in the browsers of unsuspecting visitors, a finding that suggests the unethical and possibly illegal practice has only picked up steam since it came to light a few weeks ago. Willem de Groot, an independent security researcher who reported the findings Tuesday, told Ars that he believes all of the 2,496 sites he tracked are running out-of-date software with known security vulnerabilities that have been exploited to give attackers control. Attackers, he said, then used their access to add code that surreptitiously harnesses the CPUs and electricity of visitors to generate the digital currency known as Monero. About 80 percent of those sites, he added, also contain other types of malware that can steal visitors’ payment card details. “Apparently, cyberthieves are squeezing every penny out of their confiscated assets,” he said. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cryptojacking craze that drains your CPU now done by 2,500 sites

Quark fusion makes ten times as much energy as nuclear fusion

Scientists have overcome huge barriers in the past year to get us even closer to nuclear fusion, and with it a near-limitless supply of clean energy. But, what if there’s something far more powerful out there? According to researchers at Tel Aviv University and the University of Chicago, there is, and it involves the fusion of elementary particles known as quarks — the resulting energy from which would be ten times that of nuclear fusion. Quarks (not to be confused with the alien from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) are tiny particles that make up the neutrons and protons inside atoms. They come in six different types, with scientists referring to them in terms of three pairs: up, down; charm, strange; and top, bottom. To find out more, researchers at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been smashing atoms together at high speeds. Doing so, causes these component parts to split from their parent atoms, and fuse with other particles, creating baryons. Prior research has indicated that energy is produced when quarks bind together. By looking into one-such occurrence (a doubly-charmed baryon), the physicists found that it would take 130 megaelectronvolts (MeV) of energy to force two charm quarks together. On top of that, the fusion ends up releasing even more power, around 12 MeV. Motivated by their findings, they then focussed on the much-heavier bottom quarks. The same binding process, they claim, would theoretically release approximately 138 MeV, which is almost eight times as much as hydrogen fusion (which also powers hydrogen bombs). Naturally, this set off alarm bells, with the researchers hesitating to go public with their findings. “If I thought for a microsecond that this had any military applications, I would not have published it, ” professor Marek Karliner told Live Science . But, further calculations suggested that causing a chain reaction with quarks would be impossible — mainly because they don’t exist long enough to set each other off. Plus, there’s the fact that this type of bottom quark fusion is completely theoretical. Whereas, the researchers didn’t fuse bottom quarks themselves, they claim it is technically achievable at the LHC. Source: Nature

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Quark fusion makes ten times as much energy as nuclear fusion

LED lights could get better with self-assembling particles

LEDs have dramatically transformed the lighting world over the past few years, thanks to their increased efficiency and life-span over past technologies. But LEDs could see even more upgrades with perovskite particles, a self-assembling nanoscale material that could make them even more efficient and cheaper to produce, Physorg reports . Researchers have already shown how perovskites could improve solar cells, but until now it was difficult to create uniform films made out of the material. “Our new technique allows these nanoparticles to self-assemble to create ultra-fine grained films, an advance in fabrication that makes perovskite LEDs look more like a viable alternative to existing technologies, ” said Barry Rand , an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Princeton and the lead researcher in the findings. Basically, this bodes well for the future of LEDs. It could eventually make it easier to developer LED panels for TVs and monitors, or drive down the cost of LED lighting. Lighting using the new technology are superior in many ways to old-school incandescent bulbs, or even slightly more modern fluorescent bulbs, but they still cost quite a bit more than the older competition. Via: Physorg Source: Nature

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LED lights could get better with self-assembling particles