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Oct 30, 2020

Study: 1 to 2 million tons of US plastic trash go astray

Posted by in category: materials

The equivalent of as many as 1,300 plastic grocery bags per person is landing in places such as oceans and roadways, according to a new study of U.S. plastic trash.

Oct 30, 2020

Officials Warn of Cyberattacks on Hospitals as Virus Cases Spike

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, cybercrime/malcode

Hundreds of American hospitals are being targeted in cyberattacks by the same Russian hackers who American officials and researchers fear could sow mayhem around next week’s election.

The attacks on American hospitals, clinics and medical complexes are intended to take those facilities offline and hold their data hostage in exchange for multimillion-dollar ransom payments, just as coronavirus cases spike across the United States.

“We expect panic,” one hacker involved in the attacks said in Russian during a private exchange on Monday that was captured by Hold Security, a security company that tracks online criminals.

Oct 30, 2020

Flash graphene rocks strategy for plastic waste

Posted by in categories: chemistry, sustainability

Plastic waste comes back in black as pristine graphene, thanks to ACDC.

That’s what Rice University scientists call the process they employed to make efficient use of waste that would otherwise add to the planet’s environmental woes. In this instance, the lab of Rice chemist James Tour modified its method to make flash graphene to enhance it for recycling plastic into graphene.

The lab’s study appears in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.

Oct 30, 2020

Pentagon leaders targeted by potential threats linked to killing of Iranian Gen. Soleimani

Posted by in category: military

Senior U.S. officials revealed Thursday that security threats have been made against top Pentagon authorities not only when traveling outside the U.S., but when on American soil.

Frist reported by NBC News on Thursday and verified for Fox News by a senior Department of Defense representative, security officials believe the threats made could be linked to the killing of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani by American forces in January, though definitive links could not reportedly be made.

The names of the Pentagon officials were not released, but they are believed to have been senior leadership involved in the operation that oversaw the takedown of Soleimani. Military leaders have also reportedly been targeted.

Oct 30, 2020

U.S. Sells Seized Iranian Oil

Posted by in categories: energy, government, terrorism

The United States has sold crude oil seized from four Iranian tankers earlier this year for some $40 million the AFP reports, citing a U.S. government official.

“We estimate that in excess of $40 million will be recouped by the United States related to the sale of petroleum from those four vessels,” Michael Sherwin, acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia said. Sherwin added that “a great portion” of the money will be donated to a fund for the victims of “state-sponsored terrorism”.

In the middle of August, the U.S. Administration said it had seized the fuel cargo of several vessels, alleging that the fuel came from Iran and was going to Venezuela. The confiscation followed a lawsuit filed by U.S. prosecutors to seize the cargo carried by the four vessels for violating U.S. sanctions against Venezuela.

Oct 30, 2020

This Guy Is Creating Actual Diamonds From Reclaimed CO2

Posted by in category: sustainability

Malchemy

The resulting diamond is identical to one pulled out of the ground — and Vince says Ecotricity is already capable of making about 200 carats every month.

“Making diamonds from nothing more than the sky, from the air we breathe — is a magical, evocative idea — it’s modern alchemy,” Vince told The Guardian. “We don’t need to mine the earth to have diamonds, we can mine the sky.”

Oct 30, 2020

AI has cracked a key mathematical puzzle for understanding our world

Posted by in categories: information science, mathematics, robotics/AI, transportation

Unless you’re a physicist or an engineer, there really isn’t much reason for you to know about partial differential equations. I know. After years of poring over them in undergrad while studying mechanical engineering, I’ve never used them since in the real world.

But partial differential equations, or PDEs, are also kind of magical. They’re a category of math equations that are really good at describing change over space and time, and thus very handy for describing the physical phenomena in our universe. They can be used to model everything from planetary orbits to plate tectonics to the air turbulence that disturbs a flight, which in turn allows us to do practical things like predict seismic activity and design safe planes.

The catch is PDEs are notoriously hard to solve. And here, the meaning of “solve” is perhaps best illustrated by an example. Say you are trying to simulate air turbulence to test a new plane design. There is a known PDE called Navier-Stokes that is used to describe the motion of any fluid. “Solving” Navier-Stokes allows you to take a snapshot of the air’s motion (a.k.a. wind conditions) at any point in time and model how it will continue to move, or how it was moving before.

Oct 30, 2020

Bumper crop of black holes in new gravitational wave paper

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

Only a few years ago, scientists the world over celebrated as the first-ever gravitational waves were detected—confirming a long-held scientific theory and opening up an entirely new field of research.

Now, the international research team responsible for detecting has announced a further 39 gravitational wave events, bringing the total number of confirmed detections to 50.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo Collaborations, which include researchers from the University of Portsmouth, have today published a series of papers that record events including the mergers of binary black holes, binary stars and, possibly, neutron star-black holes.

Oct 30, 2020

Nitrogen-Fixing Microbes Found in Antarctic Sea

Posted by in category: biological

The discovery puts a nail in the coffin of a long-held assumption about the limits of where the essential process can occur.

Oct 30, 2020

Google’s Project Zero discloses Windows 0day that’s been under active exploit

Posted by in category: security

Security flaw lets attackers escape sandboxes designed to contain malicious code.