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Phoenix666 writes:

Scientists have discovered bacteria living in sub-surface brine in the Dry Valleys in Antarctica, in conditions similar to those that might still exist on Mars.

At the end of Taylor Glacier, which spills into one of the Dry Valleys (Taylor Valley, actually), a mysterious red trickle of salty, iron-rich water periodically stains the ice as it spills out like blood from a wound. It’s a good thing that it isn’t a paranormal message from ghosts warning researchers to leave the valley, because it has had the opposite effect—it draws them in. In 2012, for example, biologists looking for signs of life eking out an existence in the Dry Valleys discovered that Blood Falls contained an impressive community of microbial life.

It is thought that the weight of the glacial ice is squeezing these periodic flows out of the sediment beneath, but the bigger question is what that water is doing there in the first place. It’s cold enough in this area that Taylor Glacier should be frozen to its bed—which ought to be made of frozen sediment. But that assumes fresh water. The Blood Falls water is salty enough to stay liquid down to -6 degrees Celsius at surface pressure (and could go lower at higher pressure).
...
And if there are bacteria living in the water of Blood Falls, it stands to reason those bacteria live in the groundwater, as well—an unexpected ecosystem in a terribly inhospitable environment surviving because the water is too salty to yield to the frigid temperatures. Those bacteria are probably getting their energy from breaking down minerals in the sediment.

Given recents reports that brine could form on Mars, there's a chance that life once did, or still could, inhabit it. It would rather put the "extreme" in "extremophile," though.

oaklandwatch writes:

Today comic book stores around the world celebrate "Free Comic Book Day", offering anyone who pays them a visit some free comic books. This year there's 50 different titles to choose from, including a reprint of Neil Gaiman's "Lady Justice" (not seen in print in nearly 25 years) and a new Fight Club story by Chuck Palahniuk. The Marvel and D.C. universes are represented, as well as Doctor Who, The Simpsons, Jim Henson's Labyrinth, and even something called Steampunk Goldilocks. Saturday many bookstores will also be recognizing "Independent Bookstores Day" with special events, though ironically, some fans may be tempted to visit Amazon.com instead to download some free Kindle editions of last year's free comic books.

AnonTechie writes:

http://theconversation.com/space-debris-what-can-we-do-with-unwanted-satellites-40736

There are thousands of satellites in Earth orbit, of varying age and usefulness. At some point they reach the end of their lives, at which point they become floating junk. What do we do with them then?

Most satellites are not designed with the end of their life in mind. But some are designed to be serviced, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, which as part of its final service was modified to include a soft capture mechanism. This is an interface designed to allow a future robotic spacecraft to attach itself and guide the telescope to safe disposal through burn-up in the Earth’s atmosphere once its operational life has ended.

Thinking about methods to retire satellites is important, because without proper disposal they become another source of space debris – fragments of old spacecraft, satellites and rockets now orbiting Earth at thousands of miles per hour. These fragments travel so fast that even a piece the size of a coin has enough energy to disable a whole satellite. There are well over 100,000 pieces this size or larger already orbiting Earth, never mind much larger items – for example the Progress unmanned cargo module, which Russian Space Agency mission controllers have lost control of and which will orbit progressively lower until it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere.

takyon writes:

A week after a Chinese team reported semi-successful modification of human embryos, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, has said in a statement that his agency will not fund any research involving human germline modification:

The concept of altering the human germline in embryos for clinical purposes has been debated over many years from many different perspectives, and has been viewed almost universally as a line that should not be crossed. Advances in technology have given us an elegant new way of carrying out genome editing, but the strong arguments against engaging in this activity remain. These include the serious and unquantifiable safety issues, ethical issues presented by altering the germline in a way that affects the next generation without their consent, and a current lack of compelling medical applications justifying the use of CRISPR/Cas9 in embryos.

Practically, there are multiple existing legislative and regulatory prohibitions against this kind of work. The Dickey-Wicker amendment prohibits the use of appropriated funds for the creation of human embryos for research purposes or for research in which human embryos are destroyed (H.R. 2880, Sec. 128). Furthermore, the NIH Guidelines state that the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, "...will not at present entertain proposals for germ line alteration". It is also important to note the role of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in this arena, which applies not only to federally funded research, but to any research in the U.S. The Public Health Service Act and the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act give the FDA the authority to regulate cell and gene therapy products as biological products and/or drugs, which would include oversight of human germline modification. During development, biological products may be used in humans only if an investigational new drug application is in effect (21 CFR Part 312).

However, some scientists aren't joining the chorus of "universal" criticism:

George Church, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, disagrees that the technology is so immature. He says that the researchers did not use the most up-to-date CRISPR/Cas9 methods and that many of the researchers' problems could have been avoided or lessened if they had.

Although researchers agree that a moratorium on clinical applications is needed while the ethical and safety concerns of human-embryo editing are worked out, many see no problem with the type of research that Huang's team did, in part because the embryos could not have led to a live birth. "It's no worse than what happens in IVF all the time, which is that non-viable embryos are discarded," says John Harris, a bioethicist at the University of Manchester, UK. "I don't see any justification for a moratorium on research," he adds. Church, meanwhile, notes that many of the earliest experiments with CRISPR/Cas9 were developed in human induced pluripotent stem cells, adult cells that have been reprogrammed to have the ability to turn into any cell type, including sperm and eggs. He questions whether Huang's experiments are any more intrinsically problematic.

Phoenix666 writes:

The UK generated 19.2% of its electricity from wind, solar, and hydropower in 2014. The country's demand for electricity has also fallen 10% over the last 5 years.

Change doesn't happen in a linear fashion.

Indeed, those of us who have been pushing for a low carbon future would have been forgiven for thinking it was a futile cause just a few years ago. Yet now, change seems to be picking up pace. Dramatically. The latest example of this is news from the UK, reported over at Business Green, that renewables made up 19.2% of the country's power supply last year, up from just 14.9% a year earlier. At the same time, both coal and nuclear dipped, while gas increased its share a little bit too. Digging into what those renewables actually were, it looks like wind and solar were up 16.6% on the previous year, due mainly to new capacity, while hydropower was up 26%. (This was the result of heavier rainfall, so can't necessarily be counted on year-over-year.)

We're going to be seeing many more stories like this in the next few years. It's already been reported that Germany generated 30% of its electricity from renewables in 2014. As industrialized countries, they could well find energy independence through renewables confers key competitive advantages and many positive externalities (such as better air quality). Will the United States ever follow suit?

sigma writes:

Automotive World reports that European demand for Alternative Fuel Vehicles (AFVs) has risen rapidly in the first quarter of 2015, with plug-in electric vehicles leading the charge with a rate of increase of 117.9%. While the USA leads in total numbers of EVs registered, its rate of growth is slightly lower at 69%. Interestingly, the UK was responsible for the greatest increase in Alternative Fuel Vehicle purchases in Europe (64.2%), with the most popular vehicles being the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, followed by Nissan's Leaf, and the BMW i3.

Now that ACEA has discharged these numbers, it's clear that resistance to electric vehicles is falling, and there's solidly grounded potential for better AFVs to galvanize buyers off their current fossil fueled cars. Regulators are doing their part to overcome reluctance, and to prove EVs have the capacity to operate on all roads and open circuits.

CoolHand writes:

A 3D rendering of the "Pillars of Creation" has been accomplished using the MUSE instrument for ESO's VLT.

A ScienceDaily article provides info:

Using the MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have produced the first complete three-dimensional view of the famous Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. The new observations demonstrate how the different dusty pillars of this iconic object are distributed in space and reveal many new details -- including a previously unseen jet from a young star. Intense radiation and stellar winds from the cluster's brilliant stars have sculpted the dusty Pillars of Creation over time and should fully evaporate them in about three million years.

The original NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the famous Pillars of Creation was taken two decades ago and immediately became one of its most famous and evocative pictures. Since then, these billowing clouds, which extend over a few light-years,* have awed scientists and the public alike.

Here is a NASA article on the Pillars with "High Definition" images from Hubble.

In an additional interesting factoid for the 25th anniversary of the launching of the Hubble Telescope, this article from phys.org details how the orbit differs from the ISS and the best places to see the Hubble as it orbits the Earth.

chromas writes:

Ars technica has an article about a system for cracking Master-brand combination locks and a calculator to speed up the process:

There's a vulnerability in Master Lock branded padlocks that allows anyone to learn the combination in eight or fewer tries, a process that requires less than two minutes and a minimal amount of skill to carry out.

The technique was devised by Samy Kamkar, a serial hacker who has created everything from stealthy keystroke-pilfering USB chargers to DIY stalker apps that mined Google Streetview. In 2005, he unleashed the Samy worm, a cross-site scripting exploit that knocked MySpace out of commission when it added more than one million MySpace friends to Kamkar's account.

Samy's website (js required) lists some of his exploits and looks like a graphical desktop. The calculator is also freely available .

AnonTechie writes in with an interesting article from phys.org:

Do U.S. consumers boycott products in response to international conflict? Two professors at the University of Virginia say that in the case of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the answer is "yes." Remember "freedom fries?" A brief refresher: As the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush was gearing up to wipe out what it called Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction," tensions were rising in the U.N. Security Council. France was deeply opposed to an attack and threatened to use its veto power to stop the action.

In the U.S., sentiment toward Paris plummeted, particularly among conservative Americans. Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly announced on the air he was boycotting French products and Capitol Hill cafeterias famously renamed French fries as "freedom fries," in an edible admonishment of the French government.

So talk of boycotts was in the air. But, as noted in a forthcoming paper in the journal Review of Economics and Statistics, measuring their economic impact has been a slippery affair.

"Most studies infer boycott behavior from indirect measures, such as bilateral trade patterns, abnormal stock market returns or consumer surveys, which are typically inconsistent with actual behavior," write associate professor of politics Sonal Pandya and business professor Rajkumar Venkatesan in their study, "French Roast: Consumer Response to International Conflict; Evidence from Supermarket Scanner Data."

It occurred to Pandya that supermarket scanners might offer some firm data on Americans' buying habits, so she and Venkatesan decided to dig deeper, studying weekly sales in 1,110 U.S. supermarkets in 50 regions across the country. For every week in 2003 they compared each store's sales of French-sounding brands to that same week in 2002. "Consumers' often use supermarket brands as an expression of their identity to others and also themselves," Venkatesan said.

[Paper]: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/REST_a_00526#.VUEShvBOKSp

[Source]: https://news.virginia.edu/content/study-tracks-us-boycott-french-sounding-products-during-2003-iraq-war

AnonTechie writes in with an article from phys.org:

Most new patents are combinations of existing ideas and pretty much always have been, even as the stream of fundamentally new core technologies has slowed, according to a new paper in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface by SFI researchers Hyejin Youn, Luis Bettencourt, Jose Lobo, and Deborah Strumsky.

Youn and colleagues reached those conclusions sifting through the records of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Dating back to 1790, the records feature an elaborate system of technology codes—a vocabulary of sorts, in which any new invention is a phrase.

The researchers found that throughout the USPTO's history, about 40 percent of patents have been refinements on existing patents that leave the "phrase" unchanged. The rest are either new words or new phrases—and the balance between those has changed. "Suppose you write a long novel. You may emphasize the introduction of new vocabularies or the introduction of new phrases," says Youn.

[Abstract]: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v11/n1/full/nphys3222.html

[Source]: http://www.santafe.edu/news/item/youn-language-patents/

AnonTechie writes:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/30/spam-blasting-malware-infects-thousands-of-linux-and-freebsd-servers/

Several thousand computers running the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems have been infected over the past seven months with sophisticated malware that surreptitiously makes them part of a renegade network blasting the Internet with spam, researchers said Wednesday. The malware likely infected many more machines during the five years it's known to have existed.

Most of the machines infected by the so-called Mumblehard malware are believed to run websites, according to the 23-page report [PDF] issued by researchers from antivirus provider Eset. During the seven months that they monitored one of its command and control channels, 8,867 unique IP addresses connected to it, with 3,000 of them joining in the past three weeks. The discovery is reminiscent of Windigo, a separate spam botnet made up of 10,000 Linux servers that Eset discovered 14 months ago.

The Mumblehard malware is the brainchild of experienced and highly skilled programmers. It includes a backdoor and a spam daemon, which is a behind-the-scenes process that sends large batches of junk mail. These two main components are written in Perl and they're obfuscated inside a custom "packer" that's written in assembly, a low-level programming language that closely corresponds to the native machine code of the computer hardware it runs on. Some of the Perl script contains a separate executable with the same assembly-based packer that's arranged in the fashion of a Russian nesting doll. The result is a very stealthy infection that causes production servers to send spam and may serve other nefarious purposes.

cmn32480 writes:

In an article from NASA.gov, the end of MESSENGER's mission to Mercury is described as the probe runs out of fuel:

A NASA planetary exploration mission came to a planned, but nonetheless dramatic, end Thursday when it slammed into Mercury’s surface at about 8,750 mph and created a new crater on the planet’s surface.

Mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, have confirmed NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft impacted the surface of Mercury, as anticipated, at 3:26 p.m. EDT.

Mission control confirmed end of operations just a few minutes later, at 3:40 p.m., when no signal was detected by NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) station in Goldstone, California, at the time the spacecraft would have emerged from behind the planet. This conclusion was independently confirmed by the DSN’s Radio Science team, which also was monitoring for a signal from MESSENGER.

“Going out with a bang as it impacts the surface of Mercury, we are celebrating MESSENGER as more than a successful mission,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “The MESSENGER mission will continue to provide scientists with a bonanza of new results as we begin the next phase of this mission--analyzing the exciting data already in the archives, and unravelling the mysteries of Mercury.”

Prior to impact, MESSENGER’s mission design team predicted the spacecraft would pass a few miles over a lava-filled basin on the planet before striking the surface and creating a crater estimated to be as wide as 50 feet.

Phoenix666 writes:

Thanks in part to Argentina's volatile financial markets, bitcoins are helping people there cut out the banks and government entirely in their financial transactions:

That afternoon, a plump 48-year-old musician was one of several customers to drop by the rented room. A German customer had paid the musician in Bitcoin for some freelance compositions, and the musician needed to turn them into dollars. Castiglione [the bitcoin moneychanger] joked about the corruption of Argentine politics as he peeled off five $100 bills, which he was trading for a little more than 1.5 Bitcoins, and gave them to his client. The musician did not hand over anything in return; before showing up, he had transferred the Bitcoins — in essence, digital tokens that exist only as entries in a digital ledger — from his Bitcoin address to Castiglione’s. Had the German client instead sent euros to a bank in Argentina, the musician would have been required to fill out a form to receive payment and, as a result of the country’s currency controls, sacrificed roughly 30 percent of his earnings to change his euros into pesos. Bitcoin makes it easier to move money the other way too. The day before, the owner of a small manufacturing company bought $20,000 worth of Bitcoin from Castiglione in order to get his money to the United States, where he needed to pay a vendor, a transaction far easier and less expensive than moving funds through Argentine banks.

Do any Solentils manage their transactions in bitcoin? What are your experiences?

AnonTechie writes:

Ars Technica reports about a case in Missouri that may have been dropped to law enforcement's use of Stingray:

A woman accused of being a getaway driver in a series of robberies in St. Louis has changed her plea from guilty to not guilty after finding out that a stingray was used in her case.

Wilqueda Lillard was originally set to testify against her three other co-defendants, whose charges were also dropped earlier this month. As a result of changing her plea, the local prosecutor dropped the charges against her on Monday.

Terence Niehoff, Lillard’s attorney, explained to Ars that she pleaded guilty before learning about the use of the stingray. When her co-defendants’ attorneys challenged a police detective during a deposition, and that officer refused to provide further information, the case was eventually dropped.

However, Lauren Trager, the spokeswoman for the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office denied to Ars that the dropping was related:

I am unable to provide the information you requested. Despite the opinion of the defense attorney in this matter, the dismissal of the cases was not related in any way to any technology used in the investigation."

Immerman writes:

An article at NasaSpaceFlight.com is claiming that the superficially reactionless EmDrive has again been tested at NASA Eagleworks, this time in hard vacuum, and the anomalous thrust is still being detected:

A group at NASA's Johnson Space Center has successfully tested an electromagnetic (EM) propulsion drive in a vacuum – a major breakthrough for a multi-year international effort comprising several competing research teams. Thrust measurements of the EM Drive defy classical physics' expectations that such a closed (microwave) cavity should be unusable for space propulsion because of the law of conservation of momentum.

With the popular explanations of thermal convection or atmospheric ionization being ruled out by operation in vacuum, and thrust thousands of times greater than expected from a photon rocket, is it time to start taking the EM Drive seriously as a fundamentally new form of propulsion, and possibly a door to new physics?