Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg addressed a recent series of negative stories about the company for the first time by saying accusations that it puts profit over user safety are “just not true.”
Remember the philosophical argument our universe is a simulation? Well, a team of astrophysicists say they’ve created the biggest simulated universe yet. But you won’t find any virtual beings in it—or even planets or stars.
The simulation is 9.6 billion light-years to a side, so its smallest structures are still enormous (the size of small galaxies). The model’s 2.1 trillion particles simulate the dark matter glue holding the universe together.
Continue reading “The Biggest Simulation of the Universe Yet Stretches Back to the Big Bang” »
It is a well-known fact that pure, distilled water is an almost perfect insulator and does not conduct electricity. It consists of H2O molecules that are loosely linked to one another via hydrogen bonds. However, any impurities, like salts, in the water enable it to conduct electricity. To create a conduction band with freely moving electrons, water would have to be pressurized to such an extent that the orbitals of the outer electrons overlap, something that only exists deep inside of large planets such as Jupiter.
Now, a team of researchers from 11 institutions around the world have used a completely different approach to create metallic water for the first time. They have achieved that feat by forming a thin layer of gold-colored metallic water on the outside of a droplet of liquid metal and documented this phase transition at the BESSY II facility in Berlin.
The key to the breakthrough was to pair the water with alkali metals, which release their outer electron very easily.
Circa 2012
It’s okay, you’ve not clicked on “Green Plane Reports”, but every so often something from beyond the world of cars catches our attention.
This time, it’s electric flight. The concept is nothing new, and it’s even been alluded to by people like Elon Musk of Tesla, but for the time being it remains a true flight of fancy, rather than a working concept for passenger transportation.
Continue reading “Electric Aircraft Has Unlimited Range… With A Fleet Of Recharging Planes” »
Circa 2016 Awesome
Solar Impulse 2 which landed in Abu Dhabi, is first plane powered by the renewable energy source to tour the globe.
Autonomous machine expected to pick more than 25,000 raspberries a day, outpacing human workers.
Circa 2019
Autonomous machine expected to pick more than 25,000 raspberries a day, outpacing human workers.
Continue reading “Robocrop: world’s first raspberry-picking robot set to work” »
Cloud-based content management provider Box has announced a new “deep scan” functionality that checks files as they are uploaded to identify sophisticated malware and avert attacks.
The new capabilities constitute part of Box Shield, which uses machine learning to prevent data leaks, detect threats, and spot any kind of abnormal behavior. In April of last year, Box added a slew of automated malware detection features to the mix, allowing Box Shield customers to spot malicious content that may already have been uploaded to a Box account. However, so far this has leaned heavily on “known” threats from external intelligence databases. Moving forward, Box said it will mesh deep learning technology with external threat intelligence capabilities to analyze files for malicious scripts, macros, and executables to protect companies from zero-day (unknown) vulnerabilities.
When a user uploads an infected file, Box will quarantine it for inspection but will still allow the user to view a preview of the file and continue working.
These attacks were perpetrated by a newly discovered Iranian state sponsored threat group — dubbed MalKamak — that has been operating under the radar since at least 2018.
This operation has been ongoing for years, continuously evolving its malware year after year, while successfully evading most security tools. The authors of ShellClient invested a lot of effort into making it stealthy to evade detection by antivirus and other security tools by leveraging multiple obfuscation techniques and recently implementing a Dropbox client for command and control (C2), making it very hard to detect. By studying the ShellClient development cycles, Cybereason researchers were able to observe how ShellClient has morphed over time from a rather simple reverse shell to a sophisticated RAT used to facilitate cyber espionage operations.
The most recent ShellClient versions observed in Operation GhostShell follow the trend of abusing cloud-based storage services — in this case, the popular Dropbox service. The ShellClient authors used Dropbox to exfiltrate the stolen data and send commands to the malware. Threat actors have increasingly adopted this tactic due to its simplicity and the ability to effectively blend in with legitimate network traffic. Ultimately, this discovery tells researchers a lot about the tactics that advanced attackers are using to defeat security solutions.
In drought-parched California, some residents are turning to pricey machines that developers say can produce hundreds of gallons of water a day, literally out of thin air.
BENICIA, Calif. (AP) — The machine Ted Bowman helped design can make water out of the air, and in parched California, some homeowners are already buying the pricey devices.
The air-to-water systems work like air conditioners by using coils to chill air, then collect water drops in a basin.
Continue reading “In dry California, some buy units that make water from air” »
