Astronomy needs expensive things, and lots of them. You might remember that astronomers almost literally turned the Earth into a telescope just to see a black hole, by combining lots of existing radio telescope dishes. Read more…
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An Old Satellite Dish Found on Google Maps Is Becoming West Africa’s First Radio Telescope
Astronomy needs expensive things, and lots of them. You might remember that astronomers almost literally turned the Earth into a telescope just to see a black hole, by combining lots of existing radio telescope dishes. Read more…
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An Old Satellite Dish Found on Google Maps Is Becoming West Africa’s First Radio Telescope
Astronomy needs expensive things, and lots of them. You might remember that astronomers almost literally turned the Earth into a telescope just to see a black hole, by combining lots of existing radio telescope dishes. Read more…
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An Old Satellite Dish Found on Google Maps Is Becoming West Africa’s First Radio Telescope
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phone Arena: On Tuesday, Apple is expected to report its fiscal second quarter earnings. In that report, the tech titan will reportedly announce that it is holding $250 billion in cash. If you think that this is a lot of money, you’re absolutely right. According to Marketwatch.com, this is more than the foreign currency reserves held by the U.K. and Canada combined. Looking at it another way, at current valuations Apple could purchase all of the outstanding shares of Walmart and Procter & Gamble and still have money left over. It has taken Apple only 4 and half years to double its cash hoard. During the fiscal first quarter of 2017, Apple was adding $3.6 million to its cash position every hour. It finished the quarter ending in December with $246.09 billion in cash. 90% of the money is banked overseas, which means that Apple would be one of the companies to benefit the most from President Trump’s plan to offer a one time tax break on repatriated funds. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apple Has a Record $250 Billion In Cash, 90% of It Is Banked Overseas
My first question was, “What is a time crystal?” Harvard graduate students Soonwon Choi, Joonhee Choi and postdoctoral researcher Renate Landig all started laughing. “That’s a very good question, ” said Soonwon. The time crystal’s silly science fiction name shrouds its deep quantum mechanical nuance. Sometimes a name… Read more…
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Scientists Finally Observed Time Crystals—But What the Hell Are They?
An international team of researchers say they’ve found fossils dating back to at least 3.77 billion years ago, making them the oldest fossils ever found on our planet. The discovery, though sure to attract scrutiny, has implications for our understanding of how life got started on Earth—and how it may have emerged… Read more…
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Scientists Claim to Have Found Our Planet’s Oldest Fossils
Enlarge (credit: aling_ ) Everything from solar power panels to everyday electronics relies on advanced materials and manufacturing processes. But some interesting things are also being made with some old-school tech: plants. Recently, researchers have demonstrated the ability to create electronic plants, or e-Plants, which made their own localized analog and digital circuits. These technologically savvy plants were produced using the existing plant vascular system, so first-generation models are limited by the nature of their leafy hosts. Now, a team of researchers has developed a new method to produce e-Plants, in this case getting a rose ( Rosa floribunda ) to produce its own wiring and even supercapacitors. Energy transport Eleni Stavrinidoua, Roger Gabrielsson, et al Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Researchers grow electronic rose complete with wires and supercapacitors
The Dark Web is having a rough time right now… although the victims in this case won’t earn too much sympathy. An Anonymous-linked hacker speaking to Motherboard brought down about a fifth of the Tor network’s ‘secret’ websites (over 10, 000 of them) in a claimed vigilante move. The intruder decided to attack a Dark Web hosting service, Freedom Hosting II, after discovering that it was managing child porn sites it had to be aware of — they were using gigabytes of data each when the host officially allows no more than 256MB. Each site had its usual pages replaced with a message that not only chastised FH2, but offered a data dump (minus user info) and explained the nature of the hack. Reportedly, the attack wasn’t difficult. The hacker only needed to have control over a site (new or existing) to get started. After that, it was mostly a matter of modifying a configuration file, triggering a password reset and getting root access. From early indications, the perpetrator is handling the data relatively responsibly. It’s going to a security researcher who’ll hand it over to law enforcement, which might just use it to bust the porn peddlers. Investigators may be as frustrated as they are happy, though. When the FBI infiltrated Dark Web porn sites , it used location-tracking malware to help identify individual users. Well, it probably can’t do that now — investigators might pinpoint the site operators, but the clients will have scattered to the four winds. While this is still a blow to the internet’s criminal underbelly, it’s not as big a victory as it could have been. Looks like Freedom Hosting II got pwned. They hosted close to 20% of all dark web sites (previous @OnionScan report) https://t.co/JOLXFJQXiH — Sarah Jamie Lewis (@SarahJamieLewis) February 3, 2017 Source: Motherboard , Sarah Jamie Lewis (Twitter)
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Hack knocks out a fifth of the Dark Web
Reader Mark Wilson writes: Earlier in the year, a huge DDoS attack was launched on Krebs on Security. Analysis showed that the attack pelted servers with 620 Gbps, and there were fears that the release of the Mirai source code used to launch the assault would lead to a rise in large-scale DDoS attacks. Welcome Leet Botnet. In the run-up to Christmas, security firm Imperva managed to fend off a 650 Gbps DDoS attack. But this was nothing to do with Mirai; it is a completely new form of malware, but is described as “just as powerful as the most dangerous one to date”. The concern for 2017 is that “it’s about to get a lot worse”. Clearly proud of the work put into the malware, the creator or creators saw fit to sign it. Analysis of the attack showed that the TCP Options header of the SYN packets used spelled out l33t, hence the Leet Botnet name. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Bigger Than Mirai: Leet Botnet Delivers 650 Gbps DDoS Attack
As you might guess, measuring antimatter is rather tricky: it’s destroyed the moment it comes into contact with regular matter, so conventional approaches just aren’t going to cut it. Give credit to CERN, then, as its Alpha group just measured antimatter for the first time. The team stuffed positrons (positively charged electrons) and antiprotons (protons with a negative charge) into a vacuum tube to create antihydrogen, with a “magnetic trap” keeping a small number of the anti-atoms in existence for long enough to measure them. The team then blasted the antimatter with a laser to study its positrons as they shifted energy levels, producing a spectral line. The results aren’t shocking — surprise, antihydrogen behaves much like regular hydrogen (just with reversed charges). If it didn’t, scientists would have to rethink their understanding of physics. The very act of measuring is important, though. In addition to shedding light on the nature of antimatter, it also tells scientists something about the nature of the universe. In theory, matter and antimatter should have destroyed each other almost immediately. The new findings don’t explain why that didn’t happen, but they suggest that it isn’t due to the inherent nature of those substances. Via: NPR , Popular Mechanics Source: CERN , Nature
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Physicists learn how to measure antimatter