Lifeboat Foundation

Russia appears to have used Austin’s network as infrastructure to stage additional cyberattacks.

Circa 2015

Imagine a blimp city floating 30 miles above the scorching surface of Venus – a home for a team of astronauts studying one of the solar system’s most inhospitable planets.

NASA is currently doing just that; floating a concept that could one day see a 30-day manned mission to Earth’s closest planetary neighbor.

Continue reading “NASA’s plan for an off-world colony: a floating city above Venus” »

According to a report from the Intercept, “state-sponsored hackers believed to be from Russia have breached the city network.” City officials told KVUE they are aware of the hacking group but cannot comment on an ongoing investigation.

The breach is believed to have started in October as part of a series of hacks allegedly carried out by the group Berserk Bear, as reportedly revealed by Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center documents obtained by the Intercept.

According to an October CISA alert, a Russian state-sponsored actor was targeting federal, state, territorial and tribal government networks and aviation networks. CISA urged entities to perform a full password reset and systematically rebuild the network. A statement following the alert named Berserk Bear as the actor, with Texas included in a map of compromised targets.

Microsoft wants you to know this hack is even bigger than you think.

Microsoft president Brad Smith warned that the wide-ranging hack of the SolarWinds’ Orion IT software is “ongoing,” and that investigations reveal “an attack that is remarkable for its scope, sophistication and impact.” The breach targeted several US government agencies and is believed to have been carried out by Russian nation-state hackers.

Smith characterized the hack as “a moment of reckoning” and laid out in no uncertain terms just how large and how dangerous Microsoft believes the hack to be. It “represents an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world,” Smith argues.

Continue reading “Microsoft president sounds alarm on ‘ongoing’ SolarWinds hack, identifies 40 more precise targets” »

“What we’re looking at now is not just an attack that is ongoing, that is not just highly sophisticated, but also we cannot trust the supply chain. We can no longer trust that any third-party application in these systems has not been compromised by Russia,” says NYT’s Nicole Perlroth.

Artificial intelligence helped co-pilot a U-2 “Dragon Lady” spy plane during a test flight Tuesday, the first time artificial intelligence has been used in such a way aboard a US military aircraft.

Mastering artificial intelligence or “AI” is increasingly seen as critical to the future of warfare and Air Force officials said Tuesday’s training flight represented a major milestone.

“The Air Force flew artificial intelligence as a working aircrew member onboard a military aircraft for the first time, December 15,” the Air Force said in a statement, saying the flight signaled “a major leap forward for national defense in the digital age.”

Astronomers may have found a “Planet Nine,” but in another solar system. Will we eventually find the hypothetical Planet Nine in our own Solar System?

Even with all we’ve learned about our own Solar System, especially in the last couple of decades, researchers still face many unanswered questions. One of those questions regards the so-called Planet Nine. The Planet Nine hypothesis states that there’s a massive planet in our Solar System orbiting at a great distance from the Sun.

Nobody’s ever observed the hypothesized planet; the evidence for it lies in a cluster of bodies that orbit the Sun 250 times further out than Earth does. These objects are called e-TNOs, for extreme Trans-Neptunian Objects. According to the hypothesis, Planet Nine’s gravity is responsible for the unusual clustered orbits of these e-TNOs.

Continue reading “Chuck Yeager, the First Man to Break the Sound Barrier has Died. He was 97” »

Summary: YKL-40 may be a key player in circadian rhythm disruptions associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Source: WUSTL

Fractured sleep, daytime sleepiness and other signs of disturbance in one’s circadian rhythm are common complaints of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and the problems only get worse as the disease progresses. But the reason for the link between Alzheimer’s and circadian dysfunction is not well understood.

Anyone who has ever worked on a team knows that their strength lies in coordination and a shared vision. However, it is not always easy to provide that coordination and shared vision, and any team that lacks that cohesiveness becomes more of a hindrance than a help.

Science is not immune to the difficulties of running effective teams. There is plenty to be gained from more coordination between differing silos and physical locations. Recently a meeting in Chile prompted a group of scientists to propose a plan to change that. The result is a white paper that points out the potential benefits of coordinating ground, orbital and in situ based observations of objects. But more importantly, it suggests a different path forward where all of the space science community can benefit from the type of coordinated output that can only come from a cohesive team.

The suggested path laid out in the white paper began at the Planets2020 conference in Chile, hosted by the ALMA observatory. The meeting took place back in March, right before the Coronavirus outbreak began to restrict travel. At the conference, there was a significant amount of discussion focused on the capabilities of different Earth and space based observing platforms. The intention was to learn more about missions that coordinated ground and space-based observations, and to flesh out future ideas of how to replicate that coordination with new and existing platforms to make the best of their different capabilities. The lead author of the white paper, Vincent Kofman, a research chemist at Goddard Space Flight Center, took on that the task of coordinating that team and produced a paper that clearly lays out a better way to perform observations.