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Submission + - Colors help set body's internal clock (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The beautiful color of a sunset might be more than just a pretty picture. It could be a signal to our bodies that it’s time to reset our internal clock, the biological ticktock that governs everything from sleep patterns to digestion. That’s the implication of a new study in mice that shows these small rodents use light’s changing color to set their own clocks, a finding that researchers expect will hold for humans, too.

Submission + - Resistance to antibiotics found in isolated Amazonian tribe (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: When scientists first made contact with an isolated village of Yanomami hunter-gatherers in the remote mountains of the Amazon jungle of Venezuela in 2009, they marveled at the chance to study the health of people who had never been exposed to Western medicine or diets. But much to their surprise, these Yanomami’s gut bacteria have already evolved a diverse array of antibiotic-resistance genes, according to a new study, even though these mountain people had never ingested antibiotics or animals raised with drugs. The find suggests that microbes have long evolved the capability to fight toxins, including antibiotics, and that preventing drug resistance may be harder than scientists thought.

Submission + - Why the Myers-Briggs Test is Totally Meaningless (vox.com) 1

Submitted by tazbert
tazbert writes: At one time, it seemed like every employee I talked with knew whether they were an "ENFJ", "INTP", or one of the other Myers-Briggs personality types. I never questioned the efficacy of using these categories to guide my interactions with my co-workers. Now, after reading this article, I wonder if it made any difference. Are companies really still using this as a valid tool?

Submission + - Voting industry pushes online voting with assist from the Pentagon 1

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: As states warm to online voting, experts warn of trouble ahead

WASHINGTON — A Pentagon official sat before a committee of the Washington State Legislature in January and declared that the U.S. military supported a bill that would allow voters in the state to cast election ballots via email or fax without having to certify their identities.

What could possibly go wrong>

Submission + - Leaked Sony Contract Reveals Hollywood's Netflix Geo-Blocking Requirements (michaelgeist.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Michael Geist has uncovered Hollywood's geo-blocking requirements that imposes on Netflix in its content licensing agreements. Included with the Sony documents posted by Wikileaks, the contractual provision requires Netflix to use geo-blocking technologies. However, it is only required to target VPNs and anonymizers that "have been created for the primary intent of bypassing geo-restrictions." Moreover, Sony was forced to admit that "geolocation and geofiltering technologies may in some cases be circumvented by highly proficient and determined individuals or organizations."

Submission + - The Hidden FM Radio Inside Your Pocket (npr.org)

Submitted by mr crypto
mr crypto writes: Data providers would probably prefer you not know that most smart phones contain an FM chip that lets you listen to broadcasts for free: "But the FM chip is not activated on two-thirds of devices. That's because mobile makers have the FM capability switched off." The National Association of Broadcasters, National Public Radio, and American Public Media — have launched a lobbying campaign to get those radios switched on.

Submission + - FBI Accuses Researcher of Hacking Plane, Seizes Equipment (securityledger.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: The Feds are listening and they really can't take a joke. That's the apparent moral of security researcher Chris Roberts' legal odyssey on Wednesday, which saw him escorted off a plane in Syracuse by two FBI agents and questioned for four hours over a humorous tweet Roberts posted about his ability to hack into the cabin control systems of the Boeing 737 he was flying.(https://twitter.com/Sidragon1/status/588433855184375808) Roberts (aka @sidragon1), joked that he could "start playing with EICAS messages," a reference to the Engine Indicating and Crew Alerting System (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine-indicating_and_crew-alerting_system).

Roberts was traveling to Syracuse to give a presentation. He said local law enforcement and FBI agents boarded the plane on the tarmac and escorted him off. He was questioned for four hours, with officers alleging they had evidence he had tampered with in-flight systems on an earlier leg of his flight from Colorado to Chicago.

In an interview with The Security Ledger (https://securityledger.com/2015/04/hacker-on-a-plane-fbi-seizes-researchers-gear/), Roberts said the agents questioned him about his tweet and whether he tampered with the systems on the United flight -something he denies doing.

Roberts had been approached earlier by the Denver office of the FBI which warned him away from further research on airplanes. The FBI was also looking to approach airplane makers Boeing and Airbus and wanted him to rebuild a virtualized environment he built to test airplane vulnerabilities to verify what he was saying.

Roberts refused, and the FBI seized his encrypted laptop and storage devices and has yet to return them, he said. The agents said they wished to do a forensic analysis of his laptop. Roberts said he declined to provide that information and requested a warrant to search his equipment. As of Friday, Roberts said he has not received a warrant.

Submission + - Scientists Find Radioactive Aircraft Carrier Off California Coast

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Aaron Kinney writes in the San Jose Mercury News that scientists have captured the first clear images of the USS Independence, a radioactivity-polluted World War II aircraft carrier that rests on the ocean floor 30 miles off the coast of Half Moon Bay. The Independence saw combat at Wake Island and other decisive battles against Japan in 1944 and 1945 and was later blasted with radiation in two South Pacific nuclear tests. Assigned as a target vessel for the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests, she was placed within one-half-mile of ground zero and was engulfed in a fireball and heavily damaged during the 1946 nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll. The veteran ship did not sink, however (though her funnels and island were crumpled by the blast), and after taking part in another explosion on 25 July, the highly radioactive hull was later taken to Pearl Harbor and San Francisco for further tests and was finally scuttled off the coast of San Francisco, California, on 29 January 1951. "This ship is an evocative artifact of the dawn of the atomic age, when we began to learn the nature of the genie we'd uncorked from the bottle," says James Delgado. "It speaks to the 'Greatest Generation' — people's fathers, grandfathers, uncles and brothers who served on these ships, who flew off those decks and what they did to turn the tide in the Pacific war."

Delgado says he doesn't know how many drums of radioactive material are buried within the ship — perhaps a few hundred. But he is doubtful that they pose any health or environmental risk. The barrels were filled with concrete and sealed in the ship's engine and boiler rooms, which were protected by thick walls of steel. The carrier itself was clearly "hot" when it went down and and it was packed full of fresh fission products and other radiological waste at the time it sank. The Independence was scuttled in what is now the Gulf of the Farallones sanctuary, a haven for wildlife, from white sharks to elephant seals and whales. Despite its history as a dumping ground Richard Charter says the radioactive waste is a relic of a dark age before the enviornmental movement took hold. "It's just one of those things that humans rather stupidly did in the past that we can't retroactively fix."

Submission + - Security expert pulled off flight by FBI after exposing aircraft vulnerabilities (foxnews.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: One of the world's foremost experts on counter-threat intelligence within the cybersecurity industry, who blew the whistle on vulnerabilities in airplane technology systems in a series of recent Fox News reports, has become the target of an FBI investigation himself.

Chris Roberts of the Colorado-based One World Labs, a security intelligence firm that identifies risks before they're exploited, said two FBI agents and two uniformed police officers pulled him off a United Airlines Boeing 737-800 commercial flight Wednesday night just after it landed in Syracuse, and spent the next four hours questioning him about cyberhacking of planes.

Submission + - Earth microbe prefers living on meteorites (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Scientists have found a microbe that is happier living on meteorites than on Earth. The organism—an archaea known as Metallosphaera sedula—was originally found in 1989 living in Italy's hot acidic sulfur springs around Vesuvius. When the researchers gave them an energy drink made of powdered meteorite, the microbes went on a space dust binge—consuming their samples in only 2 weeks as compared with the 2 months it took for them to munch through their Earth samples. The team says its work could have implications for asteroid mining, where rare metals embedded in space rocks could be extracted and brought back to Earth for use in technological advancements.

Submission + - 'Geo-inference' can reveal your location in all mainstream browsers (dailydot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Research reveals that all major browsers leak data that can reveal a users location to third parties down to their country, city, neighborhood, and address. A "geo-inference" attack measures browser cache queries and uses location-sensitive data left by websites like Google or Craigslist or a full 62% of Alexa's top 100 websites in five countries.

Submission + - How many hoaxes are on Wikipedia? No one knows.... 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey has written a lengthy feature covering one of Wikipedia's most intractable problems: carefully inserted hoax information that is almost impossible to detect. Dewey's investigation starts with the recent discovery of the nonexistent Australian god "Jar’Edo Wens" (which lasted almost ten years), and discusses a Wikipediocracy post about a recent experiment by critic Greg Kohs, in which 30 articles received cleverly-chosen minor falsehoods. More than half survived for more than two months. Included is also a chart showing that editing participation in Wikipedia has "atrophied" since 2007. It is quite rare to see a feature in a major media outlet as critical as this, of Wikipedia and its little-known internal problems. Especially on the heels of a very favorable CBS 60 Minutes report. As Kohs says, “I think this has proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it’s not fair to say Wikipedia is ‘self-correcting,’”

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