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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Attackers are trying to exploit a high-severity zeroday in Cisco gear:

Telecoms and data-center operators take note: attackers are actively trying to exploit a high-severity zeroday vulnerability in Cisco networking devices, the company warned over the weekend.

The security flaw resides in Cisco's iOS XR Software, an operating system for carrier-grade routers and other networking devices used by telecommunications and data-center providers. In an advisory published on Saturday, the networking-gear manufacturer said that a patch is not yet available and provided no timeline for when one would be released.

CVE-2020-3566, as the vulnerability is tracked, allows attackers to "cause memory exhaustion, resulting in instability of other processes" including but not limited to interior and exterior routing protocols. Exploits work by sending maliciously crafted Internet Group Management Protocol traffic. Normally, IGMP communications are used by one-to-many networking applications to conserve resources when streaming video and related content. A flaw in the way iOS XR Software queues IGMP packets makes it possible to consume memory resources.

"An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted IGMP traffic to an affected device," Saturday's advisory stated. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause memory exhaustion, resulting in instability of other processes. These processes may include, but are not limited to, interior and exterior routing protocols."

[...] The advisory provides indicators that users can check to look for evidence they're under attack. The document says there are no workarounds available to use until a patch can be installed. It does, however, list things administrators can do to mitigate the effects.

Link to the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures entry for: CVE-2020-3566.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Could a tree help find a decaying corpse nearby?:

Since 1980, the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Center has plumbed the depths of the most macabre of sciences: the decomposition of human bodies. Known colloquially as the Body Farm, here scientists examine how donated cadavers decay, like how the microbiomes inside us go haywire after death. That microbial activity leads to bloat, and—eventually—a body will puncture. Out flows a rank fluid of nutrients, especially nitrogen, for plants on the Body Farm to subsume.

That gave a group of University of Tennessee, Knoxville researchers an idea: what if that blast of nutrients actually changes the color and reflectance of a tree's leaves? And, if so, what if law enforcement authorities could use a drone to scan a forest, looking for these changes to find deceased missing people? Today in the journal Trends in Plant Science, researchers are formally floating the idea—which, to be clear, is still theoretical. The researchers are just beginning to study how a plant's phenotype—its physical characteristics—might change if a human body is composing nearby. "What we're proposing is to use plants as indicators of human decomposition, to hopefully be able to use individual trees within the forest to help pinpoint where someone has died, to help in body recovery," says UT Knoxville plant biologist Neal Stewart, coauthor on the new paper.

Also At ScienceDaily

Journal Reference:
Holly Brabazon, Jennifer M. DeBruyn, Scott C. Lenaghan, et al. Plants to Remotely Detect Human Decomposition? Trends in Plant Science, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.tplants.2020.07.013

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

As reported by https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36016/the-potentially-revolutionary-celera-500l-officially-breaks-cover a possible competitor for the private business jet is now being test flown. It's a pusher-prop plane, but it looks strange due to laminar flow fuselage and very high-aspect-ratio (long, skinny) wings. A high efficiency turbo-diesel engine gives claimed cruise speed of 450 miles/hour (700+kph) at 18-25 miles per US gallon, compare to 2-3 mpg for typical business jets. With this high fuel efficiency, range is 4500 miles and operating costs are projected to be less than 20% of typical small jet. The prototype seats six, similar to other small business aircraft.

Company site at https://www.ottoaviation.com/ says:

Otto Aviation's goal is to create a private aircraft that allows for direct flights between any city pair in the U.S. at speeds and cost comparable to commercial air travel. This takes a complete reinvention of how we fly and an unprecedented look at what private aviation can be.

Think about this, if they succeed, it will undercut the large commercial aircraft companies (which make the equivalent of buses) with the option for a small group to fly privately for about the same cost (like a minivan).

Your AC submitter had the chance to fly private a few times in the past, it is a completely different experience than commercial flight. Starting with free parking at the general aviation terminal we then had a short chat with the receptionist and the pilots. Within 10 minutes we were on the plane and taxiing out for take-off. Not a hint of security and no lines in sight. When we landed at a small airport near our final destination, the rental car was waiting about 50 feet away.

On the flip side, Otto are developing a new airframe and a new engine at the same time--something that, historically, has gone wrong many times in the past.

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RandomFactor writes:

Under a veil of secrecy, China launched an experimental space plane believed to be an analog to the U.S. X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle on Thursday.

The launch was

from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center using a Long March-2F/T – Chang Zheng-2F/T – launch vehicle. Launch [was] from the LC43/91 launch complex, under a veil of secrecy with no official launch photos or even a launch time disclosed.

Chinese media emitted a laconic report referring, that "the test spacecraft will be in orbit for a period of time before returning to the domestic scheduled landing site. During this period, it will carry out reusable technology verification as planned to provide technical support for the peaceful use of space."

The vehicle may have developed out of China's delta winged Shenlong project.

On December 11, 2007, the Chinese media published an interesting image of a winged spacecraft mounted on a [wing] of [an] H-6K bomber. This was the first public acknowledgment that China was trying to develop a reusable winged space system very similar to the X-37.

Codenamed 'Project 863-706', the Shenlong Project had at the time its first launch scheduled between 2006 and 2010. In fact, Shenlong was possibly a technology development program for the actual space-worthy vehicle.

No further details of the vehicle, activity, or return schedule have been made available.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Metasurface materials put true holographic movie within grasp:

The proof of concept depends on what is called a 'metasurface', a thin film material just nanometers thick whose microstructure is artificially crafted in a way to deliver characteristics, such as clever manipulation of light, that are not found in naturally occurring materials. Metasurfaces involve very tiny repeating patterns at scales smaller than the wavelength of light. It is their shape and particular arrangement, rather than, as with conventional materials, their chemical composition, that allows metasurfaces to alter the path of light.

The researchers "printed" an array of 48 rectangular frames of a metasurface made primarily of gold and which diffracts laser light shone at it in such a way as to produce a true holographic three-dimensional image appearing mid-air (just like Princess Leia), viewable from most angles in the room.

Each of the metasurface frames is slightly different--as with a reel of celluloid film--using 48 images of the Earth rotating. The holographic movie was played back by sequentially reconstructing each frame at a rate of 30 frames per second--the frame rate used in most live TV.

"We're using a helium-neon laser as the light source, which produces a reddish holographic image," said Kentaro Iwami, one of the engineers who developed the system, "so the aim is to develop this to produce full colour eventually. [...] "

It also took an electron-beam lithography printer six and a half hours to draw the 48 frames--an extremely short film run on a loop. A six-minute holographic movie would take just over 800 hours to draw, the researchers reckon.

Metasurface holographic movie showing a rotating Earth.

Journal Reference:
Ryota Izumi, Satoshi Ikezawa, Kentaro Iwami. Metasurface holographic movie: a cinematographic approach [open], Optics Express (DOI: 10.1364/OE.399369)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Scientist Reveals Possible Reason Behind Mysterious Fall of Indus Valley Civilisation:

In an article published in Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, Nishant Malik, Assistant Professor at the School of Mathematical Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology revealed a new technique he developed to show how shifting monsoon patterns potentially triggered the fall of the Indus Valley Civilisation, a contemporary civilisation to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt in the Bronze Age.

Malik worked out a method to study paleoclimate time series, sets of data that shed a light on past climates through indirect observations. Researchers were able to develop a record of monsoon rainfall in the region for the past 5,700 years by measuring the presence of a certain isotope in stalagmites from a cave in South Asia.

Until he came up with his approach there was no mathematical proof, however, his research showed that just before the Indus Valley Civilisation's decline there was a significant shift in monsoon patterns. The pattern subsequently reversed course right before decline, which, according to the scientist, lilely[sic] means that the civilisation's ultimate fall was caused by climate change.

[*] Wikipedia entry on Indus Valley Civilisation.

Journal Reference:
Nishant Malik. Uncovering transitions in paleoclimate time series and the climate driven demise of an ancient civilization, Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science (DOI: 10.1063/5.0012059)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nothernotherguy:

Three stars, warped rings may show how planets end up moving backward:

The star system in question is named GW Orionis, and it's located in the star-forming region of Orion, about 1,250 light years from Earth. The system is young, still in the process of forming, and consists of three stars. Two of them, both somewhat larger than the Sun (2.5 and 1.4 times its mass), orbit each other closely at roughly the same distance as the Earth is from the Sun. A third star, also slightly larger than the Sun, orbits these two at a distance that's roughly eight times the distance between the Earth and Sun.

But the orbits of the three stars had consequences for the disk of gas and dust that formed around them. This disk also showed up during the imaging campaign, and [...] the results were fairly complex. Images of the disk reveal a complicated pattern of bright and dark patches surrounding the stars, along with at least three different rings of dense material within the disk.

[...] In the model, the outermost rings orbit in a single plane, but the plane doesn't align with the orbital plane of any of the stars. Perhaps more significantly, their orbits are retrograde, in that they orbit the stars in a different direction than the third star orbits the inner two. The third ring, by contrast, is oriented in the same plane as that of the stars. But its center isn't the center of the stars' orbits.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Lessons for the Navy's New Frigate From the Littoral Combat Ship - War on the Rocks:

Since their inception over a decade ago, the U.S. Navy's littoral combat ships have been plagued by cost overruns, frequent breakdowns, and an ever-changing mission set. As the former navigator of the USS Coronado, the second littoral combat ship of the Independence-class, I experienced firsthand how these ill-conceived vessels impacted sailors. Recently, the U.S. Navy selected a variant of the Italian-made European multi-purpose frigate to revitalize its stock of surface combatants, which, given the ship's design is already in use by NATO navies, is a promising sign. However, as its newest class of warships begins construction and as the Navy continues to formulate its training and crewing structures, it should take stock in the lessons learned from its ongoing struggle with the littoral combat ship.

During my nearly three-year tenure in the program, I heard a range of derisive substitutes for the littoral combat ship acronym, LCS. "Let's Change Something" and "Little Circus Show" were common and among the more polite. Indeed, the program has largely been dismissed by insiders, and even by its own sailors, as a $30 billion failure. As the navigator of the USS Coronado from 2018 to 2020, I spent much of my time struggling with the ship's many shortcomings. On one occasion our vessel's propulsion lost all power in the middle of San Diego Bay and we were saved from grounding in the city's downtown only by an emergency anchorage. The Coronado, along with the other first three littoral combat ships, have proven so disastrous that the Navy announced their early decommissioning next year.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Stanford scientists track tiny atmospheric ripples using data from internet-beaming balloons:

Giant balloons launched into the stratosphere to beam internet service to Earth have helped scientists measure tiny ripples in our upper atmosphere, uncovering patterns that could improve weather forecasts and climate models.

The ripples, known as gravity waves or buoyancy waves, emerge when blobs of air are forced upward and then pulled down by gravity. Imagine a parcel of air that rushes over mountains, plunges toward cool valleys, shuttles across land and sea and ricochets off growing storms, bobbing up and down between layers of stable atmosphere in a great tug of war between buoyancy and gravity. A single wave can travel for thousands of miles, carrying momentum and heat along the way.

[...] Published Aug. 30 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, the new research draws on superpressure balloon data from the company Loon LLC, which designed the balloons to provide internet access to areas underserved by cell towers or fiber-optic cables. Spun out of Google parent company Alphabet in 2018, Loon has sent thousands of sensor-laden balloons sailing 12 miles up in the stratosphere – well above the altitude of commercial planes and most clouds – for 100 days or more at a stretch.

[...] The Loon data proved particularly valuable for calculating high-frequency gravity waves, which can rise and fall hundreds of times in a day, over distances ranging from a few hundred feet to hundreds of miles. “They’re tiny and they change on timescales of minutes. But in an integrated sense, they affect, for instance, the momentum budget of the jet stream, which is this massive planetary scale thing that interacts with storms and plays an important role in setting their course,” Sheshadri said.

Journal Reference:
Erik A. Lindgren, Aditi Sheshadri, Aurélien Podglajen, et al. Seasonal and Latitudinal Variability of the Gravity Wave Spectrum in the Lower Stratosphere, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (DOI: 10.1029/2020JD032850)

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for aristarchus:

Sorry, Amazon, Microsoft wins JEDI contract again upon re-evaluation:

After a monthslong[sic] investigation by the Pentagon, the Department of Defense said Friday that it's sticking with Microsoft for its $10 billion cloud computing contract. And Amazon is not happy.

As a quick refresher: Microsoft was originally awarded the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, contract in October 2019 after facing off against other tech giants like IBM, Oracle, and Amazon in a fierce, yearslong[sic] bidding process. The contract would provide cloud computing services to the U.S. Army and is valued at as much as $10 billion for services rendered over a decade.

[...] The agency went on to say that this decision does not mean work will begin immediately since February's temporary injunction still stands, but it is "eager to begin" working with Microsoft to modernize the Pentagon's IT infrastructure.

In response, Amazon's cloud-computing arm, Amazon Web Services, tore into the DoD and Trump in a scathing post to its public sector blog, calling the government's investigation "nothing more than an attempt to validate a flawed, biased, and politically corrupted decision."

[...] You can read the statement in full here. TLDR: Amazon is royally pissed and the government can pry this contract from its cold, dead hands.

[...] In short, it appears the JEDI saga still isn't over so grab some popcorn and settle in, folks. This one's shaping up to be a doozy.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:

Supercomputer crunches data on COVID-19:

A genetic study of COVID-19 patients, powered by the Summit supercomputer, may have taken us a step towards understanding how the new coronavirus causes disease.

Summit, located at the Oak Ridge National Lab in the US, analysed 40,000 genes from 17,000 samples earlier this summer in an attempt to understand the virus, AI expert Thomas Smith explained in an article on the Medium platform.

While the machine is the second-fastest computer in the world, the process required it to analyse 2.5 billion genetic combinations — a feat that took over two weeks.

Its results pointed to the fact that bradykinin, a natural chemical compound that regulates blood pressure, could explain many facets of COVID-19 and some of its symptoms.

The findings may shed light on why the virus causes vascular problems in certain patients, from strokes to inflammation of the skin or toes, as well as indicating new potential therapies to treat its worst symptoms.

[...] The researchers suggested that efforts to find a treatment for symptoms should be focussed on curbing bradykinin storms.

"Further experiments identified several existing medicinal drugs that have the potential to be re-purposed to treat the Bradykinin Storm," they wrote.

"A possible next step would be to carry out clinical trials to assess how effective these drugs are in treating patients with COVID-19.

"In addition, understanding how SARS-Cov-2 affects the body will help researchers and clinicians identify individuals who are most at risk of developing life-threatening symptoms."

Also at: Medium.com

Journal Reference:
Michael R Garvin, Christiane Alvarez, J Izaak Miller, et al. A mechanistic model and therapeutic interventions for COVID-19 involving a RAS-mediated bradykinin storm, (DOI: 10.7554/eLife.59177)

[Ed Note: Added link to related story.]

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for aristarchus:

Key coronavirus forecast predicts over 410,000 total U.S. deaths by Jan. 1: 'The worst is yet to come':

In June, IHME predicted that the death toll in the U.S. would reach 200,000 by October, which appears to be on track.

[...] IHME previously projected 317,697 deaths by Dec. 1. The model now predicts that the daily death toll could rise to nearly 3,000 per day in December, up from over 800 per day now, according to Hopkins data.

[...] The most likely [IHME] scenario estimates that Covid-19 will kill 410,450 people in the U.S. by Jan. 1. The worst-case scenario, which assumes that restrictions and mask directives will ease, projects up to 620,028 people in the U.S. will die by then and the best-case scenario, which assumes universal masking, predicts that 288,380 people in the U.S. will die from Covid-19 in 2020.

[...] Despite the drop in new cases, the number of deaths caused by Covid-19 everyday in the U.S. has remained high, at nearly 1,000 new deaths per day, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

[The 9/11 terrorist attacks caused 2,977 deaths; the current US COVID-19 fatality rate is like having two 9/11 attacks each week. --Ed.]

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Teen arrested for 8 DDoS attacks that disrupted school's online classes:

A juvenile is accused of using Low Orbit Ion Cannon to shut down online classes of the fourth-largest school district in the US with a series of massive DDoS attacks.

A 16-year old high school student was arrested for allegedly targeting the Florida School district's online learning system and shutting down Miami-Dade public school district's online classes.

The accused is a juvenile; therefore, his name hasn't been revealed by the authorities.

Reportedly, the teenager attends South Miami Senior High School, which is part of Miami-Dade and has admitted to launching eight DDoS attacks using 'Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC)' to take down all the networks of the school district. This included their web architecture My School Online.

Furthermore, as the aftermath of the DDoS attacks, all the Miami-Dade servers got overwhelmed, and the district's virtual classes got disrupted for three consecutive days.

[...] The student will be facing a third-degree felony charge of using a computer to defraud and a second-degree misdemeanor of interfering with an educational institution's services. Most likely, he will be tried in state court by Miami-Dade prosecutors.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Battery-free Game Boy runs forever:

A hand-held video game console allowing indefinite gameplay might be a parent's worst nightmare.

But this Game Boy is not just a toy. It's a powerful proof-of-concept, developed by researchers at Northwestern University and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands, that pushes the boundaries of battery-free intermittent computing into the realm of fun and interaction.

Instead of batteries, which are costly, environmentally hazardous and ultimately end up in landfills, this device harvests energy from the sun — and the user. These advances enable gaming to last forever without having to stop and recharge the battery.

"It's the first battery-free interactive device that harvests energy from user actions," said Northwestern's Josiah Hester, who co-led the research. "When you press a button, the device converts that energy into something that powers your gaming."

[...] The teams will present the research virtually at UbiComp 2020, a major conference within the field of interactive systems, on Sept. 15.

[...] The researchers' energy aware gaming platform (ENGAGE) has the size and form factor of the original Game Boy, while being equipped with a set of solar panels around the screen. Button presses by the user are a second source of energy. Most importantly, it impersonates the Game Boy processor. Although this solution requires a lot of computational power, and therefore energy, it allows any popular retro game to be played straight from its original cartridge.

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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for RandomFactor:

Pentagon takes first step toward building supersonic Air Force One:

Air Force One is already one of the fastest passenger planes in the world — but the Pentagon wants to make it a lot faster.

The U.S. Air Force recently awarded a contract to the aviation firm Exosonic to begin developing a presidential aircraft that can travel at supersonic speeds. The research award, reportedly worth $1 million, will fund work to "modify" Exosonic's existing plans for a supersonic commercial plane into a proposal for a presidential-grade aircraft.

In a Twitter post this week, the Air Force's Life Cycle Management Center said the contract is intended to "develop a low-boom supersonic executive transport aircraft that will allow key decision makers and teams to travel around the world in half the time it takes now!"

The current version of Air Force One, a Boeing 747-200B series aircraft, can travel at a maximum speed of .84 mach[sic], according to Boeing.

[...] Meanwhile, Boeing already is building an updated Air Force One. The Air Force awarded Boeing a $3.9 billion contract to build two 747-8 aircraft to replace the existing 747-200B planes.

The new planes are expected to be completed by the end of 2024.

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