Sorry, did I say bigger? I meant biggest. The town of Presidio, Texas has built the biggest NaS battery in the US, capable of storing up to four megawatts of power for up to eight hours. They even nicknamed it. More »
Despite burning curiosity, I have no idea what the Dalai Lama writes in his personal emails. But somewhere in China, hackers know.
China-based hacking operations have moved from murmurs to the front page since the fracas between the Chinese government and Google flared up three months ago. Besides the communist government’s flagrant and unapologetic Internet censorship, the search giant also accused China of harboring hackers who were behind politically motivated cyber attacks, like the targeting of Chinese human rights activists’ Gmail accounts. This week, computer security experts at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto announced that they’ve been trailing a group of China-based attackers they dub the “Shadow Network” for eight months. And they say they can show that those hackers have stolen a plethora of politically sensitive materials.
The intruders breached the systems of independent analysts, taking reports on several Indian missile systems. They also obtained a year’s worth of the Dalai Lama’s personal e-mail messages. The intruders even stole documents related to the travel of NATO forces in Afghanistan [The New York Times]. They also took political documents that outlined India’s concerns about its relations with Africa, Russia, and the Middle East. The core servers for the operation seem to be based in the city of Chengdu in southwest China.
The report said it has no evidence of involvement by the Chinese government, but it again put Beijing on the defensive [Los Angeles Times]. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu bemoaned the widespread coverage of this, and insisted that the government has nothing to do with the attacks. But while the researchers behind the report, “Shadows in the Cloud,” don’t explicitly blame the Chinese government, they say they are watching to see whether the government takes any action to shut down these hackers.
Meanwhile, Google’s spats with governments aren’t over. As we reported last week, the company says that opponents to a bauxite mining project in Vietnam have been inadvertently downloading malware, and McAfee, the company that discovered the attack, says the malware created a botnet whose command-and-control systems were located within IP (Internet Protocol) address blocks assigned to Vietnam. “We believe that the perpetrators may have political motivations and may have some allegiance to the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” wrote McAfee CTO George Kurtz [PC World]. Like the Chinese government, Vietnam’s denies these allegations and calls them “groundless.”
Related Content:
80beats: Google Exposes a Cyber Attack on Vietnamese Activists
80beats: Google Defies China’s Censorship Rules; China Quickly Strikes Back
80beats: Iran Blocks Gmail; Will Offer Surveillance-Friendly National Email Instead
80beats: Hillary Clinton to China: Internet Censorship Is an “Information Curtain”
80beats: Google to China: No More Internet Censorship, or We Leave
Image: flickr / abhikrama
Please fix the code so the editor bar appears & works in google's chrome browser
I am unable to reply to any questions.
Any idea why.
this is the message i am getting.
You (or someone else on the same network) has done this operation too many times.
You will have to try again tomorrow.
Sorry for the inconvenience
Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Today we have a look at Chapter Thirteen, “The Life of the Universe.”
Excerpt:
If our comoving patch defines an approximately closed system, the next step is to think about its space of states. General relativity tells us that space itself, the stage on which particles and matter move and interact, evolves over time. Because of this, the definition of the space of states becomes more subtle than it would have been in if spacetime were absolute. Most physicists would agree that information is conserved as the universe evolves, but the way that works is quite unclear in a cosmological context. The essential problem is that more and more things can fit into the universe as it expands, so—naively, anyway—it looks as if the space of states is getting bigger. That would be in flagrant contradiction to the usual rules of reversible, information-conserving physics, where the space of states is fixed once and for all.
Of course we’ve already looked a bit at the life of the universe, way back in Chapter Three. The difference is that we’re now focusing on how entropy evolves, given our hard-acquired understanding of what entropy is and how it works for black holes. This is where we review Roger Penrose’s well-known-yet-still-widely-ignored argument that the low entropy of the early universe is something that needs to be explained.
In a sense, this is pretty straightforward stuff, following directly from what we’ve already done in the book. But it’s also somewhat controversial among professional cosmologists. The reason why can be found in the slightly technical digression that begins on page 292, “Conservation of information in an expanding universe.”
The point is that physicists often think of “the space of states in a region of spacetime” as being equal to “the space of states we can describe by quantum field theory.” They know that’s not right, because gravity doesn’t fit into that description, but these are the states they know how to deal with. This collection of states isn’t fixed; it grows with time as the universe expands. You will therefore sometimes hear cosmologists talk about the high entropy of the early universe, under the misguided assumption that there were fewer states that could “fit” into the universe at that time. (Equivalently, that gravity can be ignored.) This approach has, in my opinion anyway, done great damage to how cosmologists think about fine-tuning problems. One of the major motivations for writing the book was to explain these issues, not only to the general reader but also to my scientist friends.
At the end of the chapter I deviate from Penrose’s argument a bit. He believes that a high-entropy state of the universe would be one that was highly inhomogeneous, full of black holes and white holes and what have you. I think that’s right if you are thinking about a very dense configuration of matter. But matter doesn’t have to be dense — the expansion of the universe can dilute it away. So I argue that the truly highest-entropy configuration is one where space is essentially empty, with nothing but vacuum energy. This is also very far from being widely accepted, and certainly relies on a bit of hand-waving. But again, I think the failure to appreciate this point has distorted how cosmologists think about the problems presented by the early universe. So hopefully they read this far in the book!
A commenter takes a microbe-lover to task. It’s on! Jonathan Eisen, we await your flying scissor kick!
[Link to comment fixed]
Good morning people:
I have a problem that I need help with, I have an 89 Ford F150 pick up truck, and if you're not familiar with this let me help.
Ford installed the same steering column in their pickups for a long time, the 89's had the old style that basically is a tube that co
A Finnish analyst says Nokia's preparing a touchscreen tablet "for fall release." If confirmed, it won't be the first time that Nokia tries a tablet format. I just hope they don't take any notes from their sad previous efforts. [Reuters] More »
Erected to highlight an English river's pollution, this 14m-tall metal flower has dozens of LEDs which glow brighter the more the wind around it increases. More »
For $10/month/seat, we get almost unlimited storage, unlimited instant search of all messages and contacts, custom forms which enter directly into spreadsheets, video chat, the world’s best online calendar, the world’s best email, a collaborative document editor into which we dictate medical notes, the world’s best API for integration, Google App Engine for custom applications, and it all works on any computer, iPhone, or iPad without installation or support —all secure, legal, and private. No blueshirts, no bullshit —it just works.
You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr Andrew Yates is an investor/partner/etc in a competing EMR corporation. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this post is removed.
30,000 physicians can’t be wrong. If practice fusion was an illegal product, or an unethical product, it would have already been shut down. Being the fastest growing EMR is the country puts you under the lime-light, and practice fusion is out in the open for all to see…and it keeps growing.
Put your money where your mouth is and challenge them, Mr. Yates. Report them to the feds, call the police, call your politician, tell the press, sue them. If you shut them down, I will eat my words and apologize to you for being so naive and stupid.
All I ask is that you do it quick, because I am on the verge of signing up. So I would like you to bring them down before I make the move.
First: yes, 30,000 physicians can be wrong. Second, what idiot would invest in a business whose business plan is to “sell” a free and unlawful version of Google Spreadsheets implemented in Adobe Flash? Not me. I don’t work for Google, and I don’t care about nerd shit like “EMRs.” Not even actual computer nerds are nerdy enough to care about EMRs.
As for enforcing the law: I’m not the law. The federal and state government can prosecute whomever they want —they don’t need my help. You want to use Practice Fusion? Go ahead (dumbass).
Also: 30,000 physicians? There are only about 300,000 physicians in the United States total. 10% of physicians in the United States use Practice Fusion? Really? I’d be surprised if 10% of physicians regularly use email for clinical use.
We're STILL reviewing as many iPad apps as possible LIVE and updating all day. If you have a specific app you want reviewed, let us know in the comments. So many apps that we had to start a third post! More »
Over the last few days, questions surrounding the iPad have normally been along the lines of: When will I get my paws on one? What apps should I get? What if I break it? But the question over at the blender company Blendtec has been more straightforward as everyone wondered, “Will it blend?”
Over the last few years, the company has been producing videos that showcase the industrial strength of their commercial blenders. In this video, they set out to find if Apple’s tablet can be blended into an iPad smoothie by chucking it into the “Total Blender” and turning in on. Needless to say, we gripped the edges of our table and wept a little (ok, a lot) as the brand-new iPad was smashed to smithereens.
Past “Will it Blend” videos have shown objects like glow sticks or an iPhone being demolished by the roaring blender. Blendec’s website proudly states:
The Total Blender two jar package includes both the standard 2-quart BPA-free jar, as well as the new BPA-free 3-quart jar featuring a precision tuned 4” blade and a patented fifth side. This larger five sided jar / 4″ blade combination creates a more powerful blending vortex, allowing you to power through tougher blending tasks with ease in less time.
Are you ready? Then watch what happens here.
Related Content:
Discoblog: iPad Arrives—Some Worship It, Some Critique It, HP Tries to Kill It
80beats: Apple’ iPad Tablet: It’s Here, It’s Cool, and It’s Slightly Cheaper Than Expected
Discoblog: Weird iPhone Apps (our growing compendium of the oddest apps out there)
Image: Apple
Well, what to make of this? A man walks into an Apple Store in Santa Monica, asks for a 2.66GHz MacBook Pro, and suddenly security gets thrown into high alert. Beware the "forerunner," my friends. More »
Small parts requiring deburring, edge blending or other surface finishing can present production challenges to manufacturers. Often, production is taken offstream where hand-held tools are necessary to perform the intricate secondary finishing many of these components require. This action freq
Doctors already use concentrated sound waves to see through solid tissue and take a look inside the body, as with ultrasound scans. But in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Caltech scientists say they’ve developed a metamaterial that focuses sound to such a high concentration that it could go on the offensive, targeting cancers or kidney stones while leaving the surrounding tissues alone. Oh, and one other thing: The military could use it to make weapons.
“The beauty of this system is that it’s just a bunch of ball bearings that we control with weights,” said Chiara Daraio [Discovery News], a member of the research team. Caltech’s acoustic lens relies on the same principle as Newton’s cradle—that toy your high school science teacher probably kept on his or her desk with metal balls on strings that demonstrated the conservation of energy. In this design, 21 parallel chains each contain 21 bearings. When the team strikes one end, it starts a compression wave that carries through the system. But instead of having the last ball swing out like a pendulum and bring the momentum back into the system, like the toy does, the acoustic lens focuses all the energy at the end of the system onto one spot, just a few inches away from the metamaterial.
Researcher Alessandro Spadoni says the team had medical uses in mind when they designed this acoustic lens. “In particular, tissue temperature at the focal point can be increased with high acoustic-energy density, which results from a compact focal volume and high pressure induced by sound bullets,” Spadoni adds [Scientific American]. Thus, he says, you could potentially target and heat up cancerous tissue without affecting surrounding healthy tissue. Or, if they modulated the system a different way, the researchers say it could be used to see inside the body without the possible risks related to radiation-based imaging. The paper also hints at use in defense systems, though it leaves the implications of that to the imaginations of others. Sound bullets could be used by the military to create submarine melting waves of pressure or shock waves powerful enough to destroy caves otherwise untouchable by conventional weapons [Discovery News].
The Caltech scientists are far from the first to tinker with acoustic lenses, but the simplicity of their design makes it appealing. The research model currently works in two dimensions and hasn’t been tested on living cells. But, researchers says, scaling up to 3D could focus sound waves even better, and the applications of such a technology will depend on how much sound wave intensity the team can focus into one spot.
Related Content:
80beats: New Laytex & Plastic Soundproofing Could Stop Even Rumbling Bass Sound
80beats: This May Sound Strange: Sonic Lasers and Sonic Black Holes
80beats: The 3D Invisibility Cloak: It’s Real, But It’s Really Tiny
Image: PNAS
Western Digital has updated its two-year-old Velociraptor range of hard drives with the SATA 3.0 drives, coming in 450 and 600GB capacities. They're the fastest-writing hard drives around, transferring up to 6GBs a second. More »
First of all, my thoughts and prayers go out to the lost miners, their families, and their friends. Coal dust and iron ore flows in the veins of my fore fathers, but mining is something I turned down several times in my youth.
MONTCOAL, W.Va. - A huge underground explosion blamed on met
Hi, I wonder how circuit breaker breaking capacity decreases (with which proportion) with voltage it breaks..
