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After drawing both praise and skepticism, the team of astronomers who discovered NGC 1052-DF2 – the very first known galaxy to contain little to no dark matter – are back with stronger evidence about its bizarre nature.

Dark matter is a mysterious, invisible substance that typically dominates the makeup of ; finding an object that’s missing is unprecedented, and came as a complete surprise.

“If there’s one object, you always have a little voice in the back of your mind saying, ‘but what if you’re wrong?’ Even though we did all the checks we could think of, we were worried that nature had thrown us for a loop and had conspired to make something look really special whereas it was really something more mundane,” said team leader Pieter van Dokkum, Sol Goldman Family Professor of Astronomy at Yale University.

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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).”

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  • Colliding black holes and neutron stars create ripples in spacetime, called gravitational waves. These were “heard” for the first time in September 2015.
  • On Monday, a pair of gravitational-wave detectors called LIGO will turn back on after 6 months of downtime and upgrades.
  • To boost its power, the experiment will now work with a sister machine in Italy called Virgo.
  • Physicists expect the next period of searching for colliding black holes to last a year and be 40% more sensitive than before.

One of the most remarkable experiments in history — a pair of giant machines that listen for ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves — will wake up from a half-year nap on Monday. And it will be about 40% stronger than before.

That experiment is called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO); it consists of two giant, L-shaped detectors that together solved a 100-year-old mystery posed by Albert Einstein.

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