If I were to fill a 5 gallon container 3/4 of the way up with a 3,000 psi concrete without air entrainment (w/c 0.40, 3% entrapped air only) and put an airtight lid on it what effect if any would happen?
Is the concrete effected in any way or would it harden to what would be expected of a 3
Sticking accelerator pedals were just the beginning. Soon you might lose control of your car not because of a technical failure, but because someone hacked into it from afar.
Tomorrow at a security conference in California, Stefan Savage and his team will present their research showing how they used the computer systems that oversee different systems in a car to break in and take control—braking and accelerating against the driver’s will.
The researchers concentrated their attacks on the electronic control units (ECUs) scattered throughout modern vehicles which oversee the workings of many car components. It is thought that modern vehicles have about 100 megabytes of binary code spread across up to 70 ECUs [BBC News].
The software Savage’s team created, called CarShark, took advantage of the fact that ECUs must communicate between different systems. Electronic Stability Control, for instance, must talk to the brakes, accelerators, and wheels; Active Cruise Control and systems that parallel park the car for you also rely on communication across many systems. The team inserted fake packets of data into the lines of communication to seize control of a car, Savage says.
He and co-researcher Tadayoshi Kohno of the University of Washington, describe the real-world risk of any of the attacks they’ve worked out as extremely low. An attacker would have to have sophisticated programming abilities and also be able to physically mount some sort of computer on the victim’s car to gain access to the embedded systems. But as they look at all of the wireless and Internet-enabled systems the auto industry is dreaming up for tomorrow’s cars, they see some serious areas for concern [BusinessWeek].
Savage said he and his team wanted to get a head start on the problem of car-hacking, which is sure to arise when hackers get the chance, especially with more wireless access. In small ways it has already started: A couple of months ago an Austin, Texas, man who was fired by a car dealership broke into the remote system that the dealer used to torment people who were delinquent on their payments by honking the horn or otherwise annoying them. About 100 people found their cars inoperable, or honking like mad, after his hack.
The researchers said they did not address the question of the defenses the cars might have against remote access, but said the experience of the PC industry, which did not have extensive security problems until computers became networked, was worth remembering. “To be fair, you should expect that various entry points in the automotive environment are no more secure in the automotive environment than they are in your PC,” Mr. Savage said [The New York Times].
Car companies should probably address this issue before they offer us the networked “road trains” of the future.
Related Content:
80beats: Reports: Chinese Hackers Stole Indian Missile Secrets & the Dalai Lama’s E-mail
80beats: Massive Spanish Botnet Busted, But Hacker Mastermind Remains Unknown
80beats: Code Protecting 80 Percent of Cellphone Convos Finally Cracked
80beats: In the Commute of the Future, Drivers Can Let a Pro Take the Wheel
Image: Savage et. al.
For once, I'm not being sarcastic. You don't have to bother running your sarcasm-detecting algorithm over that headline, students at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Because it's true! More »
Foxconn—one of Apple's main providers—is so worried about employee suicidal rate that they've hired 100 counsellors to help. Their concern isn't only about the living, however: They're bringing 30 Buddhist monks to release the suicide souls from purgatory. More »
Reader note: "Keith et al: My girlfriend sent me this link to a contest Google is running for student "Google Doodle" submissions. Voting is currently underway for the four finalists, one from each grade group (K-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10-12).
The 4th through 6th grade submissions have two space exploration doodles. One for a playground in space, and another for space exploration. http://www.google.com/doodle4google/vote.html#grade-4-6 (see region 4 and region 9). The 7th through 9th grade submissions have one with a space component above the G in Google. http://www.google.com/doodle4google/vote.html#grade-7-9 (see region 6).
It seems that the 4th though 6th grade crowd aren't deterred by the debate about the future of NASA, they may just want to be part of it. Maybe with the help of NASAWatch readers there will be a student space doodle on the Google home page. - Mark"
Considering the approaching hurricane season, can an average automobile electrial system be big enough to provide continuous power for a 5000 Watt inverter?
If not, could you please recommend a configuration that might be more suitable?
Regards,
-- Duck
The San Francisco Zen Center has announced that they will present The Accidents of Our Materials with sculptors Arthur Ganson and Elizabeth King.
The presentation will explore the concepts of gesture, intention, and empathy as Ganson and King present their work and engage the audience in conversation. Using materials as varied as oil, concrete, and artichoke petals, Arthur Ganson explores existential conundrums with mechanized kinetic sculptures that mysteriously exhibit human qualities.
Elizabeth King combines movable figurative sculptures with stop-frame animation, blurring how we perceive what is real and what is virtual, imbuing the inanimate with an air of conscious intent. Ganson and King will be discussing the thematic similarities of their work, as well as engaging with the audience around notions of time, humanity, and consciousness for this fourth installment of The Expert’s Mind.
Arthur Ganson has been making kinetic sculpture for over thirty years, having received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Hampshire in 1978. A former artist-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he currently maintains an ongoing exhibition of sculpture at the Gestural Engineering exhibit at MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work has been and is currently exhibited in galleries and museums in both the United States and Europe.
Elizabeth King combines precisely movable figurative sculptures with stop-frame animation in works that blur the perceptual boundary between actual and virtual object. Intimate in scale — a theater for an audience of one — and made to solicit close looking, the work reflects her interests in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and the puppet, and literature’s host of legends in which the artificial figure comes to life.
The event will take place Thursday, June 3 from 7:30pm – 9:30pm.
It’s the essence of instinct: If you take a lab mouse who has never caught a glimpse of a cat and waft a little eau de feline towards it, the mouse will freeze in fear, and will then back away from the source of the odor. Now researchers have pinned down the chemical signals the mice are reacting to–and have shown in the process a fascinating new form of inter-species communication.
Mice have a specialized organ in their noses that picks up chemical signals, called the vomeronasal organ, which helps them detect pheromones emitted by other mice. These mice pheromones have a direct effect on behavior–most obviously in the realms of mating and fighting. In this new study, published in the journal Cell, neurobiologist Lisa Stowers decided to investigate whether the vomeronasal organ was capable of picking up signals from other species as well.
The reseachers took normal lab mice and mutant mice with inactive vomeronasal organs and presented them with cotton balls laced with predator smells, including cat saliva and rat urine. The normal mice backed into the corners of their cages as if trying to escape a predator’s attention, but the mutant mice showed no signs of concern. The mutants were so relaxed that they didn’t even react when a live but anesthetized rat was placed in their cages.
“In fact, one of our subjects curled up and went to sleep next to the rat,” Dr. Stowers said. “We think he was cold” [The New York Times].
The researchers then identified the precise chemicals that were triggering the fear reaction in mice by dripping one chemical compound at a time on to a cotton ball, and found that compounds called Mups, or major urinary proteins, were the active ingredient. Despite their name, Mups aren’t only present in urine, but also in saliva and other secretions.
Experts say this work is a major step forward for understanding the biology of fear.
“This paper moves the field forward by about a century, because it actually identifies the proteins that are responsible for eliciting fear in mice,” says Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist at the Rockefeller University in New York City. It also shows that “Mups can be used not only for chemical conversations of animals in the same species, but they can also send information across species” [ScienceNOW].
Related Content:
80beats: Sniffing Out Sickness: Mouse Noses Respond to the Urine of Diseased Mice
80beats: Mammals Have a Nose for Danger (Literally)
80beats: Do Humans Communicate Via Pheromones? The Jury Is Still Out
DISCOVER: The Brain: The First Yardstick for Measuring Smells
DISCOVER: Top 100 Stories of 2009, #75: Yes, You Really Can Smell Fear
Image: iStockphoto
I can't say I've ever had a problem with the current design of scissors which has served us well since the mid-1700s, but designer Spencer Nugent has seen fit to magic up these Comfort Grip scissors. More »
Speaking of Texas political goofballery…
I’ve written extensively about the maniacal practices of the Texas State Board of Education: promoting creationism, twisting reality, and most recently engaging in ridiculous historical revisionism. Because, after all, Joseph McCarthy was simply a misunderstood patriot.
<insert rolleyes here>
Well, there’s been an update to this insanity. Two actually: one is that the Texas BoE is now an international embarrassment, since the UK paper The Guardian has picked up on this story. I’d like to think that the more publicity this story gets, the more pressure there will be on Texas citizens to throw those antireality bums out of the BoE. However, I suspect that the people who voted them in in the first place will consider stories like this a badge of honor.
The second bit of news sounds good at first, but I don’t think will make much difference: a California legislator is introducing a bill that will make sure that any Texas nonsense introduced into textbooks will be reviewed by the California BoE, and the results reported both to the Legislature and the secretary of education.
Personally, I don’t see much use for this bill. The concern behind it is that the decisions made by the Texas BoE have national ramifications, since they have such a huge educational system that it’s easier for textbook publishers to simply use the Texas standards in their books that they sell in the national market. That’s not strictly the case; in reality there are four very large markets that influence textbooks (California is bigger than Texas, in fact, and the other two are Florida and New York). It is true, though, to the best of my knowledge, that Texas does unduly influence the way education is presented in textbooks in national markets, however. I used to work in this business, and talked to quite a few teachers, educational experts, and people who helped create national education standards, so I have some experience in this.
Be that as it may, the California bill doesn’t really do much. It just says that the California BoE has to report any problems they see, but it’s vague on the next step. Even a staff member of Leland Yee, who introduced the bill, says it’s just a precautionary measure. It strikes me that the California BoE should be doing stuff like this anyway, so I’m unsure of the efficacy of a bill like this.
I’ll note that in 2005, Yee passed bills making it illegal to sell video games rated M to minors. I’m a bit of a libertarian when it comes to such things; while I don’t think young kids should be playing violent video games, I don’t think it’s the government’s place to be making it illegal. It strikes me as the government being in loco parentis, as well as just being a bandaid on a much larger issue.
This new BoE bill appears to me to be more of the same thing. We’ll see. I will add one thing: despite my admonitions above, I’m very glad that the government of a big state sees right through the snake oil the Texas BoE is peddling. While I don’t think California needs legislation to make sure the Texas BoE silliness doesn’t infect other states, they certainly need to keep a jaundiced eye on it.
Tip o’ the mortarboard to Slashdot.
It is no secret that our book, Unscientific America, which will soon release in paperback, displeased many New Atheists. They didn't much like the argument that science and religion can work together, rather than always being at odds; that constant warfare between the two isn't necessary, and can be destructive. But don't forget that there is another side in this debate that is also devoted to incompatibility, rather than reconciliation--the anti-science "intelligent design" types. Here is none other than Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute criticizing those like myself, or Michael Ruse, who are atheists but also take a compatibilist stance:
So it turns out that atheists like Ruse and Mooney promote compatibility between God and evolution out of constitutional concerns. They fear that if atheism and evolution become too closely linked, this could make the teaching of evolution unconstitutional. Thus, they feel they’d better fix the problem by going around preaching that God and evolution are compatible.
Now they might genuinely believe it’s possible to reconcile God and evolution, but then again, don’t forget we’re talking about ardent evolutionists and atheists who personally reject belief in God and expressly admit legally / politically oriented motives for pushing the compatibilist perspective. Isn’t that ...
An SDO image of a region on the Sun (described below). Click for larger. Image and movie: SDO (NASA) and the AIA, EVE, and/or AIA consortium.
We have above as described by NASA, an AIA image in 193 Å after a solar eruption and a flare. The dark regions show the site of evacuated material from the eruption, and the large magnetic loops were formed during the flare.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory entered “Phase E” just a few days ago. “Phase E” is the science part of the mission. As part of the mission the spacecraft is sending 1.5 Terabytes of data daily to Earth (yes bytes). Good thing they can cherry pick the data they want to see because that data rate is expected to continue until at least 2015.
The caption says this is an AIA image. AIA stands for Atmospheric Imaging Assembly and it is designed to provide a look at the solar corona. To understand the image a little more, click here to see a Quicktime movie of the area.
You can read more about the AIA here.
I have found that on a manufacturer electrical schematic for a metering unit it shows that the 11kV VT is earthed on the primary side, but when tested there was no earth. The discussion came up as to WHY THE VT MUST BE EARTHED ON THE PRIMARY SIDE?
Behold, my ultimate wet dream: Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Galaxian, Galaga, Zaxxon, Pengo, Frogger, 1942, 1943, Phoenix, Time Pilot, Bomb Jack, Arkanoid, and even Burger Time—48 classic games inside a beautiful Lego arcade cabinet. More »
In today’s link roundup, Uncertain Chad points to a new digital library of mathematical function. As a huge, huge fan of Abramowitz & Stegun (which can now be downloaded as a PDF, if you would rather not have it sitting majestically on your shelf), I am thrilled.
Sometimes you’ll be happily calculating along, and wind up with an equation you wouldn’t want to meet at night in a dark alley. But, a quick flip through Abramowitz & Stegun frequently turns up your nemesis, along with handy tricks for disarming it. Additional satisfaction comes when you write the paper, and get to throw off lines like “The solutions to equation 4 are confluent hypergeometric functions (of the first kind)”.
However, it will be hard top my amusement when I once discovered that the solutions to my problem were closely related to Anger functions.
I can only hope that Dr. Hate and Professor Loathing someday derive equally useful function forms.
is it true that blower from boiler use to clean/ clear out deposit from previous combustion inside fire tube.
my manager mention normally blower switch on for a while before combustion begins. its purpose is to clean out the fire tube.
however boilerman told me blower switch on only a
Last month, Twitter bought Tweetie—our most favorite of all iPhone Twitter apps—with the intention of rebranding it as the free, official Twitter for iPhone app. It looks like that change is imminent—Tweetie 2 disappeared from the App Store this morning without a trace, and presumably Twitter for iPhone will show up sometime soon—possibly even today or tomorrow—to take its place. We'll have a hand-on when it does. More »
Using a mobile phone for just half an hour a day could raise the risk of brain cancer by up to 40 per cent, a controversial study has suggested.
Those who used the devices the most over ten years were more likely to be diagnosed with brain tumours, according to the World Health Organisation
Nick Bilton flags a surge of job openings at Amazon, all for the Kindle team. Word is that Amazon's working on a touchscreen color Kindle, and if anything, this hiring spree shows that they're not screwing around: They're gathering software engineers, new QA staff and apparently talking to game publishers about games for the platform. This wouldn't be a Kindle 3, it'd be a Kindle tablet. More »
How are you all talented and gifted engineers,im called Derik and am pursuing a Bachelors Degree in Computer Engineering but honestly am in need of financial help in form of tuition because my performance is being affected..THANK YOU .nice time
