The First Mechanical Gear Found in a Living Creature
September 13th, 2013Via: Popular Mechanics:
With two diminutive legs locked into a leap-ready position, the tiny jumper bends its body taut like an archer drawing a bow. At the top of its legs, a minuscule pair of gears engage—their strange, shark-fin teeth interlocking cleanly like a zipper. And then, faster than you can blink, think, or see with the naked eye, the entire thing is gone. In 2 milliseconds it has bulleted skyward, accelerating at nearly 400 g’s—a rate more than 20 times what a human body can withstand. At top speed the jumper breaks 8 mph—quite a feat considering its body is less than one-tenth of an inch long.
This miniature marvel is an adolescent issus, a kind of planthopper insect and one of the fastest accelerators in the animal kingdom. As a duo of researchers in the U.K. report today in the journal Science, the issus also the first living creature ever discovered to sport a functioning gear. “Jumping is one of the most rapid and powerful things an animal can do,” says Malcolm Burrows, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge and the lead author of the paper, “and that leads to all sorts of crazy specializations.”
Cambridge University Doomers
September 13th, 2013Via: Independent:
Some of Britain’s finest minds are drawing up a “doomsday list” of catastrophic events that could devastate the world, pose a threat to civilisation and might even lead to the extinction of the human species.
Leading scholars have established a centre for the study of “existential risk” which aims to present politicians and the public with a list of disasters that could threaten the future of the world as we know it.
Lord Rees of Ludlow, the astronomer royal and past president of the Royal Society, is leading the initiative, which includes Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge cosmologist, and Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist.
The group also includes the Cambridge philosopher Huw Price, the economist Partha Dasgupta and the Harvard evolutionary geneticist George Church. Initial funding has come from Jaan Tallinn, the co-founder of Skype.
“Many scientists are concerned that developments in human technology may soon pose new, extinction-level risks to our species as a whole,” says a statement on the group’s website.
Lord Rees said in his closing speech to the British Science Festival in Newcastle this evening that the public and politicians need the best possible advice on low-risk scenarios that may suddenly become reality, with devastating consequences.
“Those of us fortunate enough to live in the developed world fret too much about minor hazards of everyday life: improbable air crashes, carcinogens in food, low radiation doses, and so forth,” Lord Rees told the meeting.
“But we are less secure than we think. It seems to me that our political masters, should worry far more about scenarios that have thankfully not yet happened – events that could arise as unexpectedly as the 2008 financial crisis, but which could cause world-wide disruption,” he said.
Professor David Spiegelhalter, an expert in risk at Cambridge University, said that our increasing reliance on technology and the formation of complex interconnected networks is making society more vulnerable.
“We use interconnected systems for everything from power, to food supply and banking, which means there can be real trouble if things go wrong or they are sabotaged,” Professor Spiegelhalter said.
“In a modern, efficient world, we no longer stockpile food. If the supply is disrupted for any reason, it would take about 48-hours before it runs out and riots begin,” he said.
“Energy security is also an issue, as we import much of our fuel from abroad, so a conflict over resources in the future is possible,” he added.
According to Lord Rees, the threat of nuclear war was the main global risk we faced in the last century, but in the fast-developing 21st Century there are new concerns over risks such as deadly bioterrorist attacks, pandemics accelerated by global air travel, cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and artificially intelligent computers that turn hostile.
“In future decades, events with low probability but catastrophic consequences may loom high on the political agenda,” Lord Rees told the science festival.
“That’s why some of us in Cambridge – both natural and social scientists – plan, with colleagues at Oxford and elsewhere, to inaugurate a research programme to compile a more complete register of these existential risks, and to assess how to enhance resilience against the more credible ones,” he said.
NSA Poses as Legitimate Websites for Man in the Middle Attacks
September 13th, 2013When you’re connected to .mil’s PSYOP ISP, you may get a ‘special’ version of the Internet.
—U.S. Has Secret Tools to Force Internet on Dictators
Via: Cnet:
Here’s one of the latest tidbits on the NSA surveillance scandal (which seems to be generating nearly as many blog items as there are phone numbers in the spy agency’s data banks).
Earlier this week, Techdirt picked up on a passing mention in a Brazilian news story and a Slate article to point out that the US National Security Agency had apparently impersonated Google on at least one occasion to gather data on people. (Mother Jones subsequently pointed out Techdirt’s point-out.)
Brazilian site Fantastico obtained and published a document leaked by Edward Snowden, which diagrams how a “man in the middle attack” involving Google was apparently carried out.
A technique commonly used by hackers, a MITM attack involves using a fake security certificate to pose as a legitimate Web service, bypass browser security settings, and then intercept data that an unsuspecting person is sending to that service. Hackers could, for example, pose as a banking Web site and steal passwords.
Some Dropbox Process Is Opening Documents
September 12th, 2013Via: WNCInfoSec:
So now I’m curious…are the files being accessed for de-duplication purposes or possibly malware scanning? If so, then why are the other file types not being opened? It appears that only .doc files are being opened…
I then uploaded more HoneyDocs files to my Dropbox folder, this time from a different computer and ISP to rule out any of those variables.
All .doc embedded HoneyDocs appear to have been accessed…from different Amazon EC-2 instance IPs.
Beeban Kidron: We Need to Talk About Teenagers and the Internet
September 12th, 2013Grim.
Via: Guardian:
There is a new world order and our children are carrying it around in their pockets.
3-Sweep: Extracting Editable Objects from a Single Photo, SIGGRAPH ASIA 2013
September 12th, 2013Via: Daniel Cohen-Or / YouTube:
Fukushima: Tritium Levels Up 15X Over Three Days
September 12th, 2013Via: Reuters:
The operator of the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant said levels of tritium – considered one of the least harmful radioactive elements – spiked more than 15 times in groundwater near a leaked tank at the facility over three days this week.
Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) said tritium levels in water taken from a well close to a number of storage tanks holding irradiated water rose to 64,000 becquerels per liter on Tuesday from 4,200 becquerels/liter at the same location on Sunday.
Tepco said last month that 300 metric tons of highly radioactive water leaked from one of the hastily built steel tanks at the plant, which was crippled by a massive earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.
A Tepco representative told reporters on Wednesday the company was investigating the high tritium reading and could not rule out the possibility that last month’s leak had contaminated the groundwater.
The elevated readings of radioactive elements at the plant come just days after Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the International Olympic Committee that the situation at the Fukushima facility, 230 km (140 miles) from Tokyo, was “under control”, with contamination limited to the area immediately surrounding the plant. Tokyo was chosen over the weekend to host the 2020 Olympic Games.
Cryptogon Reader Contributes $25
September 12th, 2013Thank you, SR.
The RAR Energia Gravity Motor
September 11th, 2013When one follows “free energy” inventors, a lot of times, the path leads to madness.
The machines in question (that don’t work, by the way) are usually very small—table top scale—bicycle tires and JB Weld sorts of things.
Knowing all of this, I nearly fell out of my chair when I looked at what RAR Energia has built in Brazil. That thing is about two stories tall, and must have cost a minimum of hundreds of thousands of dollars to build.
Take a look: RAR Energia [Be sitting down for this one.]
Now, I ask you…
Alleged Brooklyn Heroin Dealers Careful To Observe Shabbat
September 11th, 2013Via: Gothamist:
The NYPD’s narcotics team announced today that it busted a group of allegedly observant Sheepshead Bay drug dealers, a ring that dealt its wares—which included heroin, oxycodone, cocaine and more—in accordance with Shabbat.
The six-month sting—dubbed “Only after Sundown”—resulted in the April arrest of five men, with the indictment handed down today. Among the details that came to light was the group’s “strict policy of closing shop in observation of Shabbat,” as well as texts that “repeatedly cautioned customers against arriving after sundown on a Friday or before sundown on Saturday.” According to prosecutors, they don’t roll on Shabbat.
To its credit, the group was very conscientious about alerting its customers to the exact times G-d would allow them to fetch their wares, as it turns out He is apparently fine with illicit drug dealing so long as the day of rest of adequately observed.
Research Credit: almaverdad2
