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Category: security – Page 121

It’s official: Blue Origin will bring rocket engine tests back to Huntsville

One of Huntsville’s historic Apollo engine test stands is coming back to life under an agreement between NASA and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company.

NASA announced Wednesday it has signed an agreement to let Blue Origin use Marshall Test Stand 4670 to test its BE-3U and BE-4 rocket engines. The BE-4 has been selected to power United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket and Blue’s New Glenn rocket.

Both rockets are being built to power new boosters for America’s three key space markets: NASA, commercial companies like ULA and national security customers such as the Air Force.

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Graphene Terahertz Cameras Could Become Common

EU researchers have developed a graphene-enabled detector for terahertz light that is faster and more sensitive than existing room-temperature technologies. This can lead to a fully digital low-cost terahertz camera system. This could be as cheap as the camera inside the smartphone, since such a detector has proven to have a very low power consumption and is fully compatible with CMOS technology.

Detecting terahertz (THz) light is extremely useful for two main reasons. Firstly, THz technology is becoming a key element in applications regarding security (such as airport scanners), wireless data communication, and quality control, to mention just a few. However, current THz detectors have shown strong limitations in terms of simultaneously meeting the requirements for sensitivity, speed, spectral range, being able to operate at room temperature.

Secondly, it is a very safe type of radiation due to its low-energy photons, with more than a hundred times less energy than that of photons in the visible light range.

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Transhumanism Becoming the ‘Relentless Drumbeat’ Shaping Our Future

Following recent trends in state-of-the-art developments, from cryptocurrencies and universal basic income to biohacking and the surveillance state, transhumanism has been moved into the limelight of political discourse to reshape humanity’s future.

Andrew Vladimirov, Information security specialist, biohacker and one of the original members of the Transhumanist Party UK, spoke in-depth with Sputnik about the rise of transhumanism and its implications.

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Ocean plastic pollution costs the planet $2.5 trillion per year

It’s the first-ever quantification of the damage caused by plastic pollution on a global scale.

Global plastic pollution and the damage it causes to marine ecosystems now has a price tag attached to it. A team of researchers from the UK and Norway analyzed the many ways in which plastic pollution damages or destroys natural resources, and came up with a staggering figure – $2.5 billion – as the annual cost to society.

Much of our current understanding about plastic pollution is on a local level that cannot be interpreted easily on a global scale; and yet, this is a global threat. An estimated 8 million tons of plastic enter the oceans annually, and because of its material persistence and ability to disperse widely, must be viewed from a broader perspective if we hope to tackle it effectively. The researchers, whose study was just published in Marine Pollution Bulletin, looked at the many ways in which marine ecosystems benefit the planet, including food provision for billions of people, carbon storage, waste detoxification, and cultural benefits (recreational and spiritual). When these benefits are threatened by the presence of plastic, it “has the potential to significantly impact the wellbeing of humans across the globe, owing to the loss of food security, livelihoods, income and good health.”

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This Neural Implant Accesses Your Brain Through the Jugular Vein

A permanent neural implant that reads brain activity and churns out text could prove to be a valuable medical tool, but it also could provide doctors with an unprecedented 24/7 stream of neural data.

Oxley recognizes that an endless feed of brain activity could be invaluable to medical researchers, but he doesn’t have plans to tap into that yet.

“[The Stentrode is] going to show us information that we hadn’t had before. Whether that helps us understand other things is not what we’re trying to do here,” he said, clarifying that Synchron’s primary goal is to get the new brain-computer interface working so that it can help paralyzed patients. “This is a novel data set, but this raises questions around privacy and security. That’s the patient’s data, and we can’t be mining that.”

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20% of Industrial Control Systems Affected by Critical Vulnerabilities

Image: Business Wire

Over half of the 415 vulnerabilities found in industrial control systems (ICS) were assigned CVSS v.3.0 base scores over 7 which are designated to security issues of high or critical risk levels, with 20% of vulnerable ICS devices being impacted by critical security issues.

As detailed in Kaspersky’s “Threat landscape or industrial automation systems H2 2018”, “The largest number of vulnerabilities affect industrial control systems that control manufacturing processes at various enterprises (115), in the energy sector (110), and water supply (63).”

Deep Science AI joins Defendry to automatically detect crimes on camera

Deep Science AI made its debut on stage at Disrupt NY 2017, showing in a live demo how its computer vision system could spot a gun or mask in CCTV footage, potentially alerting a store or security provider to an imminent crime. The company has now been acquired in a friendly merger with Defendry, which is looking to deploy the tech more widely.

It’s a great example of a tech-focused company looking to get into the market, and a market-focused company looking for the right tech.

The idea was that if you have a chain of 20 stores, and 3 cameras at each store, and people can only reliably keep an eye on 8–10 feeds at a time, you’re looking at a significant personnel investment just to make sure those cameras aren’t pointless. If instead you used Deep Science AI’s middle layer that highlighted shady situations like guns drawn, one person could conceivably keep an eye on hundreds of feeds. It was a good pitch, though they didn’t take the cup that year.

A SETI Search of Earth’s Co-orbitals

SETI for Bracewell probes? Yes please. Years ago Jill Tarter commented that looking for such probes would be worthwhile. These days we hear about Starshot, sending a fleet of lightweight probes to the nearest star within decades which brings into mind the obvious idea that maybe someone else did so long ago.

One objection to SETI is that it is not falsifiable — there is no point at which a lack of signals can prove that extraterrestrial civilizations do not exist. But there are some aspects of SETI that can be falsifiable. Consider a class of objects near enough for us to investigate not only with listening efforts but with probes, one small enough to be thoroughly covered, and one most people know almost nothing about. Could these offer a listening post for ‘Bracewell probes,’ a way of watching the development of our culture and reporting home to ETI? And if so, could we combine SETI with METI to advance both disciplines without compromising our own security?

If the idea of nearby probes seems far-fetched today, it was even more so when Ronald Bracewell advanced his ‘sentinel hypothesis.’ Bracewell took the question of SETI and stood it on its ear. That was no mean feat in 1960, for SETI was just being born in that year through the efforts of Frank Drake at the Green Bank instrument in West Virginia. While Drake was, reasonably enough, asking whether we might pick up signs of an extraterrestrial civilization around another star, Bracewell had begun to wonder whether there might be a different way to study an alien culture. A long-lived probe could be planted in any system under investigation.

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