universe – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Marvel comics arrive in Hoopla’s public library app

Comic books are a brilliant medium, but keeping up with the latest releases can be expensive. If you live in the US, it’s worth checking out Hoopla ; the service is supported by more than 1, 500 public libraries, and offers free digital access to DC, Image and IDW titles. And starting today, another major publisher is joining the platform: Marvel . More than 250 collections and graphic novels will be available, including Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet book one — by author, journalist and comic book writer Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates — Civil War and X-Men: The Dark Pheonix Saga . There’s a handy map here that shows all of the Hoopla-supported libraries in the US. As Variety explains , the libraries set their own lending limits, so you might be able to check out five or 10 at a time through the app. You won’t, of course, get every new Marvel release, but it’s a good place to start if you’re unsure which characters or series to follow. Hoopla says there should be plenty of familiar faces from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including Spider-Man , Daredevil , The Runaways , The Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy . As Luke Cage would say: Sweet Christmas… Via: Variety Source: Hoopla (Press Release)

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Marvel comics arrive in Hoopla’s public library app

DNA Analysis Finds That Yetis Are Actually Bears

schwit1 shares a report from Popular Science: University of Buffalo biologist Charlotte Lindqvist and her international team in Pakistan and Singapore provided the first strong evidence that presumed yetis are actually bears. They published their results in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B on Tuesday. Icon Film secured nine samples that purported to be genuine yeti artifacts, and Lindqvist gathered 15 samples from known bear populations. By sequencing mitochondria from all these sources, she and her fellow researchers were able to determine that all but one of the yeti artifacts actually came from local bears. That last sample was from a dog. They also figured out that Himalayan brown bears split off from the rest of the regional bear population several thousand years ago, which is why they’re so genetically distinct from most other brown bears. Living in geographic isolation for so long has separated them from other Asian brown bears, and even from their relatives on the nearby Tibetan plateau. They even look different. But prior to Lindqvist’s work, it wasn’t clear just how long Himalayan bears had been on their own. Researchers will need higher-quality samples to figure out the whole picture, but even this small step is major for a species that’s hardly been studied. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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DNA Analysis Finds That Yetis Are Actually Bears

Scientists on new supernova: WTF have we been looking at?

Enlarge / A more typical Type-IIp supernova. (credit: NASA SWIFT ) A supernova may be one of the most extraordinary events in the Universe, but the Universe is a very big place, and the extraordinary happens with great regularity. We’ve now observed a huge number of these events and have managed to break them down into categories based on patterns in the light they produce. Astrophysicists have built models of exploding stars that explain these properties, matching them to the mass of the original star and the process by which it exploded. We’re at the point where, after just a few observations, we can understand exactly what we’re looking at. Except when we can’t. Today in Nature , a team of researchers is announcing observations of a supernova that it simply can’t explain. In some ways, the event looks like a prosaic stellar explosion. Except it’s stayed bright over six times longer than it should and experienced five periods of enhanced brightness that we can’t explain. Different features of the supernova appear to be arising from physically distinct locations in space. And even the best model for what triggered this—something that involves a type of explosion we haven’t definitively observed previously—doesn’t account for all the observations. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Half the Universe’s Missing Matter Has Just Been Finally Found

An anonymous reader shares a report: The missing links between galaxies have finally been found. This is the first detection of the roughly half of the normal matter in our universe — protons, neutrons and electrons — unaccounted for by previous observations of stars, galaxies and other bright objects in space. You have probably heard about the hunt for dark matter, a mysterious substance thought to permeate the universe, the effects of which we can see through its gravitational pull. But our models of the universe also say there should be about twice as much ordinary matter out there, compared with what we have observed so far. Two separate teams found the missing matter — made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter — linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas. “The missing baryon problem is solved, ” says Hideki Tanimura at the Institute of Space Astrophysics in Orsay, France, leader of one of the groups. The other team was led by Anna de Graaff at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Because the gas is so tenuous and not quite hot enough for X-ray telescopes to pick up, nobody had been able to see it before. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here’s your full-length ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ trailer

The next Star Wars film won’t hit theaters until December 15th, but there’s a new trailer that just aired during Monday Night Football. Star Wars: The Last Jedi brings Luke Skywalker back into the story — along with the final appearance of Carrie Fisher as Leia — and should answer some of the questions that have been eating at us ever since the credits rolled on The Force Awakens two years ago. If you’re trying to come into this flick clean but just can’t resist taking a peek at the trailer, don’t worry — director Rian Johnson feels your pain . Tickets are already on sale from a number of providers ( IMAX , Fandango , Cinemark , AMC , Alamo Drafthouse , Atom Tickets , MovieTickets.com ), but check below for the trailer in case you need a little more convincing. Oh, and if you just need more time in the universe, don’t forget that EA just announced an extension to the Star Wars Battlefront II open beta . I a legitimately torn. If you want to come in clean, absolutely avoid it. But it’s gooooood….. https://t.co/Y29K5yz8i4 — Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) October 8, 2017 FWIW: I love that there are folks who want to come into a movie clean, I think that’s awesome. Me, I’m a weak man. I watch ALL THE TRAILERS — Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) October 9, 2017 Check out the brand new poster for Star Wars: #TheLastJedi and watch the trailer tonight. pic.twitter.com/A4UGpYqoeW — Star Wars (@starwars) October 10, 2017 Source: StarWars.com , Star Wars (YouTube)

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Here’s your full-length ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ trailer

We’re Not Living in a Computer Simulation, New Research Shows

A reader shares a report: A team of theoretical physicists from Oxford University in the UK has shown that life and reality cannot be merely simulations generated by a massive extraterrestrial computer. The finding — an unexpectedly definite one — arose from the discovery of a novel link between gravitational anomalies and computational complexity. In a paper published in the journal Science Advances, Zohar Ringel and Dmitry Kovrizhi show that constructing a computer simulation of a particular quantum phenomenon that occurs in metals is impossible — not just practically, but in principle. The pair initially set out to see whether it was possible to use a technique known as quantum Monte Carlo to study the quantum Hall effect — a phenomenon in physical systems that exhibit strong magnetic fields and very low temperatures, and manifests as an energy current that runs across the temperature gradient. The phenomenon indicates an anomaly in the underlying space-time geometry. They discovered that the complexity of the simulation increased exponentially with the number of particles being simulated. If the complexity grew linearly with the number of particles being simulated, then doubling the number of partices would mean doubling the computing power required. If, however, the complexity grows on an exponential scale — where the amount of computing power has to double every time a single particle is added — then the task quickly becomes impossible. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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We’re Not Living in a Computer Simulation, New Research Shows

Scientists record a fourth set of gravitational waves

Last year, researchers confirmed the existence of gravitational waves with two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors. Shortly thereafter, they detected two additional gravitational wave-causing events that sent ripples through the universe. Well, we can now add a fourth to that list, as astronomers announced another set of waves. And for the first time, they observed the waves with a third detector — the Italy-based Virgo. Let’s review a little before we dig into the huge benefits that come with having three detectors rather than two. First, gravitational waves are essentially ripples in spacetime. When some major event occurs in the universe — like, for example, when two black holes merge into one — a ripple is sent out in all directions and it travels through spacetime at the speed of light. Albert Einstein predicted these sorts of waves existed, but it wasn’t until the LIGO project that researchers could actually observe them. The LIGO and Virgo detectors are all largely the same design. Two very long tunnels are arranged perpendicular to each other. At the point where they meet, a laser beam is split and part of it travels down one tunnel, and the other part down the second tunnel. Mirrors at the tunnel ends bounce the beams back and if no major cosmic activity has occurred, the two beams cancel each other out. However, if say two black holes slam into each other and create gravitational waves, those waves will stretch and pull spacetime, changing the length of the tunnels ever so slightly. When that happens, the two laser beams are bounced back at slightly different times and when they meet, the difference between them provides astronomers with all sorts of information about what happened, where and when. The earlier detections of gravitational waves were done with the two LIGO detectors in Washington and Louisiana. Virgo joined them on August 1st and scored its first detection on August 14th. The gravitational waves that were detected were created by two black holes — 31 and 25 times the mass of our Sun — merging around 1.8 billion light-years away. The resulting black hole is approximately 53 times the mass of the Sun. What happened to those three leftover solar masses? They were converted into gravitational wave energy. A third detector means scientists can get a much better idea about which direction the waves came from and it works similar to the way seismometers pinpoint the location of an earthquake. The two LIGO detectors themselves can provide a general direction of the event — a pretty large area equal to around 1/40th of the night sky. But adding Virgo into the mix reduces the window to a tenth of that area, which means once a signal is detected, astronomers can swing a telescope towards the region of origin and maybe catch a glimpse of it in action. The Virgo team hints in their press release that more detections from the three units will be announced sometime soon and some are hoping to hear that they’ve snagged a measurement, and maybe even a visual, of another big celestial event — two neutron stars merging . The recent detection was described in a paper published in Physical Review Letters . Image: NASA Via: BBC Source: Physical Review Letters , Virgo , National Science Foundation

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Scientists record a fourth set of gravitational waves

Unlimited ‘Stargate’ streaming will cost you $20

MGM Studios announced a new web-based entry into its popular Stargate franchise, Stargate Origins , this past July at San Diego Comic Con. In order to see the prequel series, though, you’ll have to subscribe to a Stargate -only streaming service, too. Called Stargate Command , the new portal for all things Stargate is now online and ready for subscribers. This isn’t the first entertainment property to push fans to a new paid service, of course, with CBS All Access and Star Trek: Discovery as a prime example. This new MGM service, however, will only include video from the Stargate properties. For a one-time fee of $20, you’ll get access to some 354 television episodes, according to The Verge , and the three films from the Stargate franchise, making for some serious binge-watching . In addition to access to the new Origins show, members can stream series television shows SG-1 , Stargate Atlantis and (the best of them all) Stargate Universe , as well as the associated movies, like Stargate , Stargate: The Ark of Truth and Stargate Continuum . They’ll also get behind-the-scenes access to Origins and a members-only digital edition of the Origins script later this year. Free members of Stargate Command can browse the site and all the media, and can participate in a fan forum , read news about the series and take Stargate -themed quizzes and polls . Via: The Verge Source: Stargate Command

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Unlimited ‘Stargate’ streaming will cost you $20

AI Just Made Guessing Your Password a Whole Lot Easier

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The Equifax breach is reason for concern, of course, but if a hacker wants to access your online data by simply guessing your password, you’re probably toast in less than an hour. Now, there’s more bad news: Scientists have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to create a program that, combined with existing tools, figured more than a quarter of the passwords from a set of more than 43 million LinkedIn profiles. Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, started with a so-called generative adversarial network, or GAN, which comprises two artificial neural networks. A “generator” attempts to produce artificial outputs (like images) that resemble real examples (actual photos), while a “discriminator” tries to detect real from fake. They help refine each other until the generator becomes a skilled counterfeiter. The Stevens team created a GAN it called PassGAN and compared it with two versions of hashCat and one version of John the Ripper. The scientists fed each tool tens of millions of leaked passwords from a gaming site called RockYou, and asked them to generate hundreds of millions of new passwords on their own. Then they counted how many of these new passwords matched a set of leaked passwords from LinkedIn, as a measure of how successful they’d be at cracking them. On its own, PassGAN generated 12% of the passwords in the LinkedIn set, whereas its three competitors generated between 6% and 23%. But the best performance came from combining PassGAN and hashCat. Together, they were able to crack 27% of passwords in the LinkedIn set, the researchers reported this month in a draft paper posted on arXiv. Even failed passwords from PassGAN seemed pretty realistic: saddracula, santazone, coolarse18. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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AI Just Made Guessing Your Password a Whole Lot Easier

Canada’s new radio telescope starts mapping the universe

On September 7th, an extraordinarily powerful radio telescope in Canada has begun listening to the sounds of the universe. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment or CHIME will help scientists learn more about the history of the cosmos, radio bursts from pulsars and gravitational waves, the ripples in spacetime whose existence were finally confirmed by scientists in 2016. CHIME looks like a collection of four 100-meter-long skateboarding halfpipes, but they weren’t made for anybody to skate on. They were built over the past seven years to hear very weak signals from the universe and to gather one terabyte of information per second all day, every day. That means it’s constantly creating and updating a massive 3D map of space. When the 50 Canadian scientists from the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto, McGill University and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) started conceptualizing the project, there was no system that could handle that amount of information. Thanks to advances in video game hardware, the system now exists. Since 1 TB per second is pretty insane, CHIME compresses the info it gathers by a factor of 100, 000 first before saving files on disks. Now that it’s up and working, CHIME is ready to work towards achieving its primary goal: measuring the acceleration of the universe’s expansion. An accurate measurement of the expansion will help scientists figure out what causes it, whether it’s actually the mysterious form of energy that’s believed to be permeating space called ” dark energy ” or something else. By extension, the telescope’s data could one day confirm if dark energy truly exists. University of British Columbia’s Dr. Mark Halpern explains: “With the CHIME telescope we will measure the expansion history of the universe and we expect to further our understanding of the mysterious dark energy that drives that expansion ever faster. This is a fundamental part of physics that we don’t understand and it’s a deep mystery. This is about better understanding how the universe began and what lies ahead.” Source: CHIME

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Canada’s new radio telescope starts mapping the universe