Lifeboat Foundation

Jack Steinberger, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for expanding understanding of the ghostly neutrino, a staggeringly ubiquitous subatomic particle, died on Saturday at his home in Geneva. He was 99.

His wife, Cynthia Alff, confirmed the death.

The ancient Greeks proposed that there was one invisible, indivisible unit of matter: the atom. But modern physics has found more than 100 smaller entities lurking within atoms, and observations of their dizzying interactions compose the Standard Model of what is now taken to be the order of the universe.

The Turkish metropolis of Istanbul is also known as the “City of Cats,” due to the many thousands of felines living on its streets. However, since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, life has been tough for these strays.

A startup with a new type of spacecraft propulsion system could make the interplanetary travel seen in Star Trek a reality. Magdrive has just closed a £1.4M seed round led by Founders Fund, an early investor in SpaceX, backed by Luminous Ventures, 7percent Ventures, and Entrepreneur First.

Magdrive is developing a next generation of spacecraft propulsion for small satellites. The startup says its engine’s thrust and efficiency are a “generational leap” ahead of any other electrical thrusters, opening up the space industry to completely new types of missions that were not possible before, without resorting to much larger, expensive and heavier chemical thrusters. It says its engine would make fast and affordable interplanetary space travel possible, as well as operations in Very Low Earth orbit. The engine would also make orbital manufacturing far more possible than previously.

Existing electrical solutions are very efficient but have very low thrust. Chemical thrusters have high thrust but lack efficiency and are hazardous and expensive to handle. Magdrive says its engine can deliver both high thrust and high efficiency in one system.

As the U.S. government works to contain a sprawling hacking campaign that relies on software in technology from SolarWinds, a federal contractor, technology firms are disabling some of the hackers’ key infrastructure.

Cybersecurity giant FireEye on Wednesday said that it had worked with Microsoft and the domain registrar GoDaddy to take over one of the domains that attackers had used to send malicious code to victim machines. The move is no panacea for stopping the suspected state-sponsored hacking campaign, though it could help stem the tide of victims, which reportedly includes the departments of Treasury and Homeland Security.

The seized domain, known as a “killswitch,” will “affect new and previous” infections of the malicious code coming from that particular domain, FireEye said in a statement that was first reported by independent journalist Brian Krebs. “Depending on the IP address returned when the malware resolves avsvmcloud[.]com, under certain conditions, the malware would terminate itself and prevent further execution.”

ESET researchers have uncovered a supply-chain attack on the website of a government in Southeast Asia.

Just a few weeks after the supply-chain attack on the Able Desktop software, another similar attack occurred on the website of the Vietnam Government Certification Authority (VGCA): ca.gov.vn. The attackers modified two of the software installers available for download on this website and added a backdoor in order to compromise users of the legitimate application.

Sony Corp. has created one of the hottest gadgets of the year in the PlayStation 5, but its launch has been marred by scalpers who are buying up scarce supplies and threatening the long-term health of the company’s most important product.

Ransomware attackers using evolved SystemBC malware with a Tor proxy and remote control tool.

Circa 2015

Conventional particle accelerators are typically big machines that occupy a lot of space. Even at more modest energies, such as that used for cancer therapy and medical imaging, accelerators need large rooms to accommodate the required hardware, power supplies and radiation shielding.

A new discovery by physicists at the University of Maryland could hold the key to the construction of inexpensive, broadly useful, and portable particle accelerators in the very near future. The team has accelerated electron beams to nearly the speed of light using record-low laser energies, thus relieving a major engineering bottleneck in the development of compact particle accelerators. The work appears in the November 6, 2015 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Continue reading “New discovery could enable portable particle accelerators” »

Fly through the Orion Nebula—without ever leaving Earth—with this mesmerizing 3D visualization.