We’ve written before about hapless business owners practically handing hackers customers’ information by failing to observe basic computer security (Subway, we’re looking at you). But this is a security fail on a whole different level. A researcher has just revealed that about ten thousand systems controlling water plants, sewage plants, and other infrastructure are online, mostly unprotected and findable with a simple search.
If you think of your personal computer as almost an extension of yourself, a recent Supreme Court ruling sounds a little disturbing. The Court has ordered that a woman decrypt files on her laptop so they can be used by prosecutors against her. The woman, who is being tried for mortgage fraud, argued that this is a violation of her Fifth Amendment right to keep from testifying against herself, but the Court sees the matter differently. Timothy Lee at Ars Technica’s explanation of the problem gets to the heart of it:
In previous cases, judges have drawn a distinction between forcing a defendant to reveal her password and forcing her to decrypt encrypted data without disclosing the password. The courts have held that the former forces the defendant to reveal the contents of her mind, which raises Fifth Amendment issues. But Judge Robert Blackburn has now ruled that forcing a defendant to decrypt a laptop so that its contents can be inspected is little different from producing any other kind of document.
For some, being forced to decrypt your computer and handing over your password to investigators so they can decrypt it might not seem that different—what’s hidden by your password might well feel as much a part of your mind as your password. But when you think about the precedent a ruling in the other direction might set, things get cloudier. The Department of Justice argues that if encryption is all that’s required to keep documents out of the hands of the courts, then potential child pornographers, drug smugglers, and others can refuse to hand over evidence on the grounds that it’s encrypted. Hmmm.
Another case from this week that shows the difficulty of aligning the modern sense of privacy with the law. The Supreme Court ruled that sticking a GPS device on a suspect’s car to track his whereabouts, without a warrant, is unconstitutional. But the court was divided as to why, on a very important point.
Vultures eating a gazelle.
By now, you’re probably familiar with the Body Farm at University of Tennessee. It’s one of the places where bodies donated to science go to rot while being closely observed by appreciative forensic scientists, and we say that with the greatest respect: if not for the brave few who gave their mortal remains to be studied, we would have a much harder time telling when and how people found in fields, woods, and other unusual locales died. Now, scientists working at another Body Farm-like facility, Texas State University’s Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, have performed a fascinating study to see exactly what happens when a human body is eaten by vultures.
Their findings imply that vultures can take much longer—37 days instead of 24 hours—to find a body than the carcass of a pig left in the wilderness, which is what previous studies in the Texas facility have used. On the other hand, vultures can also pick clean, or skeletonize, a body much faster than we’d thought: it took just 5 hours instead of the expected 24. The scientists also tracked where the vultures spread the body parts that they didn’t consume, as they kept visiting the body over the following five months, which will be useful in figuring out how far away a body might be if a bone or other part is found by itself in future forensic investigations.
[via New Scientist]
Image courtesy of appenz / flickr
Family reunion time!
Digging around in your DNA is getting cheaper and easier all the time. For only $207, you can now subscribe to 23andMe’s genotyping service, for instance, which gives you information about your genetic background, potential disease susceptibilities, and other traits. And as the numbers of people in such companies’ databases climb into the hundreds of thousands, it has become possible for software to connect customers who share so much DNA, they may well be relatives. For adoptees who don’t have access to their adoption records and are curious about biological family, there’s never been a better time to go searching. The New York Times follows the story of one 42-year-old woman who, after learning she was adopted, finds her third cousin through a DNA service, and details the relationship that they form as she deals with the revelation that she is not, after all, the daughter of her adoptive parents.
About five weeks after shipping off two tiny vials of her cells from a swab of her cheek, Mrs. Vaughan received an e-mail informing her that her bloodlines extended to France, Romania and West Africa. She was also given the names and e-mail addresses of a dozen distant cousins. This month, she drove 208 miles from her hometown here to Evansville, Ind., to meet her third cousin, the first relative to respond to her e-mails. Mrs. Vaughan is black and her cousin is white, and they have yet to find their common ancestor. But Mrs. Vaughan says that does not matter.
“Somebody is related to me in this world,” she said. “Somebody out there has my blood. I can look at her and say, ‘This is my family.’ ”
With their majestic peaks, imposing canyons, and lofty designation, America’s national parks seem inviolate, places of natural grandeur far from the vagaries of money or politics. But over the years, 26 sites have lost their national park status. In a slideshow at National Geographic, Brian Handwerk explores why.
A few parks were less-than-ideal candidates to begin with (the National Park Service running the Kennedy Center? huh?). But more often than not, the decision to jettison a park from the list came down to economics: Several parks, like Montana’s Lewis and Clark Caverns, above, were too remote to attract enough visitors; the caverns are now part of the state’s park system. Other ex-parks, however, are no longer open to the public: a Palm Beach retreat that proved too expensive for the government to maintain was bought by Donald Trump—and made into a swanky, exclusive club.
Read the rest at National Geographic.
Image courtesy of Montana State Parks
Tulips in the rocks.
Artist’s conception of what the living creatures would have looked like.
The Burgess Shale fossil beds in the Canadian Rockies are famous for showing us some of the creepiest evolutionary dead-ends to ever grace the planet. They conjure up underwater scenes of many-legged spiky creatures scuttling beneath gigantic spider shrimp, but a recent find in the Burgess Shale suggests a more pastoral landscape: fields of waving tulip-shaped creatures, each about 8 inches high.
These newly discovered filter feeders, named Siphusauctum gregarium by their discoverers, have been found in clumps of over 65, and appear to have fed by sucking water through their bodies and extracting food particles.
Images courtesy of Royal Ontario Museum and Marianne Collins.
[via ScienceDaily]
Shiga toxin is nasty stuff. If you are infected with a Shiga-producing bacterium, like Shigella dysenteriae or some E. coli strains, there is no clear treatment: if you are given antibiotics, your infected cells will explode, spraying the toxin all over neighboring cells and exacerbating your symptoms. Each year, 150 million people are infected with Shiga-producing bacteria, which cause dysentery and food poisoning, and a million of those die. The lack of effective treatment for such Shiga toxicosis infections is one of the main reasons this year’s outbreak of E. coli poisoning in Europe was so deadly, with more than 3,700 people infected and 45 dead. But now scientists studying how the toxin makes its way around the cell have discovered that treating mice with the metal element manganese makes them resistant to Shiga poisoning. Since manganese’s chemistry is already well understood and it’s readily available, the possibility of using it as a treatment is exciting.
Here’s how manganese blocks Shiga’s spread, according to the group’s experiments in cultured human cells:
A recent column by Dr. Pauline Chen at the New York Times explores a surprising oversight in modern healthcare: Doctors don’t really have a clue how to predict how long a patient will live. In the absence of a widely accepted, systematic method of prognosis, they’re kind of making it up—an informed guess, with the benefit of education and experience, but a guess nonetheless.
Prognosis was once a diligently studied, widely practiced part of a physician’s job, Chen writes. But as treatments improved, and keeping patients alive longer became ever more possible, the unpleasant but necessary skill of predicting when patients might die fell by the wayside. A recent study, she reports, revealed just how much:
Over the past few years, several studies have illuminated some of what happened during the brief period when modern humans and Neanderthals overlapped in Europe, with genetic analyses showing that the two groups interbred tens of thousands of years ago (though not frequently) and ancient remains suggesting that modern humans fought and—more controversially—ate their prominent-browed contemporaries.
It seems that humans and Neanderthals made occasional love and intermittent war, but what were those interludes of interaction actually like? What was going on inside those distinctive crania? It’s a tricky question to answer—behavior doesn’t fossilize—but anthropologist Thomas Wynn and psychologist Frederick L. Coolidge combine genetic and anthropological evidence with a healthy dose of well-informed speculation to offer an intriguing picture of how Neanderthals may have lived, thought, felt, and acted.
Artist’s rendering of a mitochondrian, the energy-producing
cellular structure affected by ARSACS
Scientists have pinpointed the cause of a rare, fatal neurodegenerative disorder called ARSACS, or autosomal recessive spastic ataxia of Charlevoix-Saguenay. The disease is due to defects in neuron’s mitochondria, the bit of biological machinery that generates energy for the cell—a structure known to be affected in Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and other neurological diseases, as well.
ARSACS was first observed in the descendants of a small group of 17th century French settlers who made their homes near the Charlevoix and Saguenay rivers in what is now Quebec, and has since been seen worldwide. But its incidence remains unusually high in that particular French Canadian community, with 1 in 1,500 to 2,000 people developing ARSACS and 1 in 23 people unaffected genetic carriers of the disease.
When tuberculosis kills lung tissue, it can produce gaping
holes like in the lung on the right.
For a long time, tuberculosis was a gruesome and incurable disease. Antibiotics changed that, but over the last century, as the drugs have been incorrectly used, the tuberculosis bacterium has been developing resistance to them. Multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, which requires a cocktail of many drugs to treat it, has become common. Now Indian doctors have reported in a medical journal that a strain that is resistant to all known drugs for tuberculosis has appeared in Mumbai. Twelve patients so far have been diagnosed with the strain, and it’s likely that they are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of those infected.
There are at least as many planets in the galaxy as there are stars. And even that is probably a vast underestimate.
That’s the latest bombshell from astronomers looking for planets beyond our solar system. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy will have a post on this soon, but for now, here’s a little quote salad for you:
“Planets are like bunnies; you don’t just get one, you get a bunch,” said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute who was not involved in this research. “So really, the number of planets in the Milky Way is probably like five or 10 times the number of stars. That’s something like a trillion planets.” (via PopSci)
Spring! Not.
Across the US, this winter has been unusually balmy, with precious little snow, or even rain, and with trees taking the warmth as a cue to send out new leaves in January. Temperature data support those impressions: in the first week of the year, temperatures were 40 degrees F higher than average in some parts of the Midwest, Discovery News reports, and snow cover is at 19 percent across the country, compared to an average of 50 percent at this time of year. In notoriously chilly Fargo, North Dakota, the January 4 high temperature of 55 broke the record for the warmest January day on record, and the country has seen close to no rain or snow in this first week of 2012, writes Wunderground meteorologist Jeff Masters. “It has been remarkable to look at the radar display day after day and see virtually no echoes,” he writes, referring to the radar echoes reflected back by storms. “It is very likely that this has been the driest first week of January in U.S. recorded history.”
Why this freaky weather? The answer is, basically, an extremely unusual jet stream over the last few months, Masters explains. The jet stream that defines weather in North America is controlled by the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Arctic Oscillation, climate patterns that reflect differences in sea-level pressure across certain stretches of the globe. And the pressure differences this year have been tremendous—for the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), this year saw the most extreme difference ever recorded in December, and the second most extreme for the Arctic Oscillation (AO).
Archaeologists, historians, and governments take great care to preserve human history across the globe, protecting monuments of our civilizations and traces of our origins. Even what may seem, at first, like the detritus of existence—footprints left millions of years ago, the contents of well-preserved wastebins—can serve as tangible, informative links to the past.
Now, scientists and officials are working preserve some of humanity’s best-known footprints, left by a giant leap for mankind, by extending those same sorts of historical protections to the Apollo missions’ lunar landing sites. The tricky part is, many such protections require that a site be on the territory of a state or nation—and the US government can’t claim sovereignty over any part of the moon, and doesn’t want to appear as though it’s trying to. But NASA and the New Mexico and California state governments have gotten onboard with the effort to safeguard the sites, spearheaded by New Mexico State University anthropologist Beth O’Leary. A NASA panel recently issued recommendations for protecting the sites that suggest future explorers give a wide berth to the astronautical artifacts left behind, Kenneth Chang reports at the New York Times:
How a living material of cheese fungi sandwiched between plastic sheets works.
The crusty rind of cheeses like Camembert provide more than texture: they are miniature fortress walls, made of fungus, that protect the cheese’s creamy insides from bacterial invasions. Now, taking inspiration from this delicious snack, chemical engineers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland have shown that such a fungus can be enclosed in porous plastic and will digest spills, with implications for creating antibacterial surfaces from living material.
The team sandwiched a layer of Penicillium roqueforti—from, you guessed it, Roquefort cheese—between a plastic base and a top sheet of plastic with nanoscale pores that allowed gas and liquids to move through, but did not allow the fungus to spread. Then, they mimicked a kitchen spill by pouring sugary broth on the surface and watched as, over the course of two weeks, the captive fungus gradually consumed the entire spill, leaving the surface clean. As shown in the figure above, the fungi can go dormant when there is no food around, so if one had a countertop of such a material, you wouldn’t need to keep spilling sugar on it to keep the fungi happy. Read the rest of this entry »
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